A series of disconnected hospitals, specialists, rehabilitation and services is not a system. Brain Injury Australia wants a national brain-health strategy to create a network of care.

Australia’s brain-health strategy is missing the connections

Australia has a national plan for dementia. It has a Parkinson’s action plan. It has strategies for cancer and mental health. It has no plan for the brain.

Brain Injury Australia and the World Federation of Neurology used World Brain Day on Wednesday to urge the development of exactly that: a National Brain Health Strategy. It’s a simple idea: connecting prevention, treatment, rehabilitation and long-term support.

Brain Injury Australia’s Professor Mukesh Haikerwal said people were being left to join the dots between GPs, hospitals, specialists and rehabilitation. The issue is that this is exactly when people can’t tie the many different strings together by themselves.

The issue is neurological conditions cross the neat boundaries drawn by government. Australia still funds and organises much of its response disease=by-disease, leaving people navigating disconnected. A national strategy could connect prevention, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation and establish measurable targets.

This is not just administrative untidiness. Every broken handover can mean delayed treatment, lost rehabilitation or another argument over which service is responsible.

An inaugural Brain Health Summit, convened by Brain Injury Australia and Migraine Foundation Australia in Melbourne, brought clinicians, researchers, policymakers and, critically, people with lived experience together to shape the proposal.

Held at the University of Melbourne’s Ian Potter Auditorium, the summit was organised around “Brain Health and Access for All” — the World Brain Day theme for 2026.

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Brain health crosses every boundary. Australia’s services do not

The proposal begins with a category error.

Government structures treat stroke, dementia, traumatic brain injury, migraine, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis as separate problems. Clinically, they are different. They require specialist knowledge, distinct treatments and strong disease-specific organisations.

But the people living with them often encounter the same failures: late diagnosis, thin services outside major cities, workforce shortages, interrupted rehabilitation and a bewildering transfer from one funding system to another.

That is why Brain Injury Australia matters to this debate. An acquired brain injury can follow a collision, stroke, infection, tumour, lack of oxygen or family violence. Its effects may be physical, cognitive, behavioural or emotional. Some are obvious. Others remain hidden until a person attempts to return to work, study, relationships or ordinary community life.

The service system is least convincing at precisely this point. Hospitals concentrate on acute care. Rehabilitation may be rationed by time or postcode. The NDIS funds disability support, not medical treatment. State systems, insurers and aged care each apply different rules.

The NDIS Review found poor coordination between the Scheme and complex mainstream services. The result was worse health, social and economic outcomes for people with disability.

Yet the person is still expected to understand the boundaries, even when the injury itself may affect memory, concentration, planning and communication.

Haikerwal put the absurdity plainly: “People should not need a medical degree to work out where to go next.”

The scale justifies national attention. The World Health Organization says more than three billion people were living with a neurological condition in 2021. Neurological conditions have become the world’s leading cause of ill health and disability, with the total burden rising 18 per cent since 1990.

Australia is not starting without a map. In 2022, World Health Organization member states adopted a global action plan for epilepsy and other neurological disorders. It calls for better governance, timely diagnosis and care, prevention, research, data and rehabilitation.

Australia helped adopt the plan. It has not yet translated that overarching approach into a national brain-health strategy.

Such a strategy could identify shared risks before disease or injury occurs. Blood-pressure control, diabetes management, exercise, sleep, hearing protection, reduced smoking and social connection can all protect brain health.

It could also establish national measures for access to neurological care, rehabilitation waiting times, workforce gaps and outcomes reported by people using the system.

Prevention needs care. The value of reducing avoidable injury or disease is obvious. But a brain-health strategy cannot imply disability is evidence that prevention failed, or that support should depend on how an impairment arose. Equal access to diagnosis, rehabilitation and community support remains essential after prevention reaches its limits.

The case for coordination is not an argument for creating another grand bureaucracy. Nor should a broad brain-health label swallow the expertise, identity or hard-won funding attached to individual conditions.

The useful work lies between those extremes.

A serious strategy would name the governments and agencies responsible for each stage of care. It would include people with lived experience in its design. It would confront rural access and cultural safety. It would measure whether a person actually receives treatment, rehabilitation and support, rather than counting meetings, plans and webpages.

It would also need money. Targets without services simply provide a more precise description of failure.

The Melbourne summit was billed as the beginning of a national movement and the launch of a Brain Health Pledge. That is valuable coalition-building.

It is not yet reform.

The next step belongs in Canberra. Brain Injury Australia and its partners must turn the Melbourne proposal into a specific request to federal, state and territory health ministers: agree on leadership, establish a co-design process, publish a timetable and fund the work.

Australia already knows how to write national health strategies. The question is whether it can produce one that follows the person, rather than the organisational chart.