Health Promotion in Australia
Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion
The first International Conference on Health Promotion was held in Ottawa, Canada on 17-21 November, 1986. The conference was the response to growing expectations for a new public health movement around the world. Discussions focused on needs within industrialized countries, but took into account similar concerns in all other regions.
The following information is taken from the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion.
Health promotion
Health promotion is process of enabling people to increase control over, and improve, their health. Health is seen as resource for everyday life, not the objective of living. Health promotion is not just responsibility of the health sector, but goes beyond healthy lifestyles to wellbeing.
People are involved as individuals and as members of families and communities as professional and social groups, and health personnel, have a major responsibility to mediate between differing interests in society for the pursuit of health. Health promotion strategies and programs should be adapted to the local needs and possibilities of individual countries and regions to take into account differing social, cultural and economic systems.
Commitment to health promotion
Move into the arena of healthy public policy, and advocate a clear political commitment to health and equity in all sectors.
Counteract the pressures towards harmful products, resource depletion, unhealthy living conditions and environments, and bad nutrition; focus attention on public health issues such as pollution, occupational hazards, housing and settlements.
Respond to the health gap within and between societies, and tackle the inequities in health produced by the rules and practices of these societies.
Acknowledge people as the main health resource – to support and enable them to keep themselves, their families and friends healthy through financial and other means – and accept the community as the essential voice in matters of its health, living conditions and wellbeing.
Reorient health services and their resources towards the promotion of health; share power with other sectors, disciplines and with people.
Recognize health and its maintenance as a major social investment and challenge, and address the overall ecological issues of our ways of living.
A history of health promotion development in Australia
Partly because of this success health promotion and preventative programs have attracted increasing attention and resources from all levels of Government. This trend is likely to continue as we have firm evidence that these programs give a big return on the Government’s investment as detailed in a recent report commissioned by my department. The report by Applied Economics was detailed examination ever attempted of costs and benefits of Australian public health programs and found that of the five national programs considered, every one has delivered social and community benefits for beyond its costs. While there is no formal, nationally agreed policy statement in Australia on health promotion, the principles of prevention and education are now an accepted and increasingly integrated part of our health system. This is supported by a strong infrastructure within both the government and non-government sectors, and greatly improved research. While government action is central, governments cannot work in isolation on the issues as health promotion and disease prevention can only be effective if it reaches people in their homes, workplaces and communities as people have to work across levels of governments, with business, with the medical profession and importantly – with a range of community agencies. Aside, one of the agencies is the national professional association, the Public Health Association of Australia, which was founded in 1967. The association provides strong advocacy for health promotion and prevention, and is actively involved in policy development, research and training. It also provides a forum for the exchange of ideas, knowledge and information on public health in Australia.
Within government, milestone was reached with the creation of the National Public Health Partnership in 1996. With strategic leadership from the Commonwealth, the Partnership was formed by the Health Ministers of the Commonwealth and all of the States and Territories. The Partnership’s role is to identify public health priorities in Australia, and plan and coordinate national strategies to address them. Its key objective is to ensure that all levels of government are working together in an effective and efficient way on important public health issues pulling together rather than just doing their own thing. Australia is grappling with a progressively less active and overweight and obese population with implications for escalating levels of chronic disease. During April 2002, the Council of Australian Governments comprising the Prime Minister, State and Territory Premiers and Chief Ministers and the Local Government Association – made an unprecedented agreement to work together to improve health and status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia. There have been improvements in primary care, important raise in attendance for antenatal care attending, reductions in pre-natal mortality rates and low birth-weights and close to such vaccine coverage for children under the age of five years in that community. The ability to work together is essential to delivering future health promotion programs as the programs will need to be effective and flexible in order to address local issues and needs and to respond to international emergencies and to devise new and innovative ways to tackle the difficult problems of co-morbidity and multiple risk factors which are a characteristic of our modern lifestyle.
Source of insights above:
http://www.health.gov.au/internet/wcms/publishing.nsf/Content/health-mediarel-yr2004-dept-deptsp04002.htm
Explain the rationale for change in at least 3 health or social concerns
More than one in ten internet users in Australia suffers from respiratory disease such as asthma and bronchitis and high cholesterol, making them the two main illnesses affecting Australians, according to ACNielsen, a unit of The Nielsen Company, the world’s leading marketing and media information company. In a recently released Global Consumer Report on health concerns, ACNielsen surveyed 25,408 internet users in 46 markets from Europe, Asia Pacific, North America and the Middle East, including 500 consumers in Australia, about their attitudes to and concerns with disease and health issues.
Source of insights above: http://au.acnielsen.com/site/Healthconcerns.shtml
Explain how the WHO 5 keys areas of HP action are used in each health concern: o Build healthy public policy o Strengthen community action o Develop personal skills o Create supportive environments o Reorient health services
Build healthy public policy
Health promotion policy combines diverse but complementary approaches, including legislation, fiscal measures, taxation and organisation change. Health promotion policy requires the identification of obstacles to the adoption of healthy public policies in non-health sectors and the development of ways to remove them.
Create supportive environments
The protection of the natural and built environments and the conservation of natural resources must be addressed in any health promotion strategy.
Strengthen community actions
Community development draws on existing human and material resources to enhance self-help and social support and to develop flexible systems for strengthening public participation in, and direction of, health matters. This requires full and continuous access to information and learning opportunities for health, as well as funding support.
Develop personal skills
This will enable people to learn to prepare themselves for all of its stages and to cope with chronic illness and injuries is essential. This has to be facilitated in school, home, work and community settings.
Reorient health services
The role of the health sector must move increasingly in a health promotion direction, beyond its responsibility for providing clinical and curative services. Reorienting health services also requires stronger attention to health research, as well as changes in professional education and training. A guiding principle should be that women and men should become equal partners in each phase of planning, implementation and evaluation of health promotion activities.
Identify of keys strategies used in the change action process
There were basic strategies from Ottawa Charter for health promotion:
Advocate
Good health is a major resource for social, economic and personal development, and an important dimension of quality of life. Political, economic, social, cultural, environmental, behavioral and biological factors can all flavour or harm health. Health promotion aims to make these conditions favorable, through advocacy for health.
Enable
Health promotion focuses on achieving equity in health. Health promotion action aims to reduce differences in current health status and ensure the availability of equal opportunities and resources to enable all people to achieve their full health potential. This includes a secure foundation in a supportive environment, access to information, life skills and opportunities to make healthy choices. People cannot achieve their fullest health potential unless they are able to control those things that determine their health. This must apply equally to women and men.
Mediate
The prerequisites and prospects for health cannot be ensured by the health sector alone. Health promotion demands coordinated action by all concerned, including governments, health and other social and economic sectors, non-government and voluntary organisations, local authorities, industry and the media.
Examine the use of evidence based research to justify and discuss the topic
Infrastructure refers to the systems for policy development,priority setting and resource allocation, monitoring and surveillance, research and evaluation, workforce development, and programdelivery that direct and support action to promote, protectand maintain the health of the population (National Health andMedical Research Council, 1997 p. 342).Health promotion programs are ‘delivered’ throughspecialist health promotion services, community health and primaryhealth care services, hospitals, and general practice. In addition,the private sector, non-government organizations and communityorganizations also fund and/or deliver health promotion. The plethora of fenders and providers of health promotion has resulted in some confusion about roles and responsibilities,and about leadership. A National Public Health Partnership hasbeen established in an effort to develop a more consistent,comprehensive approach to identifying and solving public healthproblems.There has been concern that the separation of policy, purchasingand service provision in health and disability services hasled to fragmentation of effort, and some reduction in investmentin infrastructure development. But there have been advantages,e.g. better information about what is purchased, increased focuson health outcomes, and the development of Maori purchasingand provider organizations.
HEALTH PROMOTION PROGRAMS
In Australia, priority populations have been identifiedin relation to each of the national health priority areas, butthere is a worrying lack of priority given to the health ofadolescents. Positive changes have been achieved in health literacy, environments, policies, structures, and in some cases, the reorientation ofhealth services. These have, in turn, resulted in reductionsin the prevalence of risk behaviors and in premature mortalityfrom a range of conditions (National Health and Medical ResearchCouncil, 1997 p. 876; Ministry of Health, 1998 p. 385). The priority programshave enabled comprehensive approaches to develop over sufficienttime in which to achieve changes in the health of the population.The challenge lies in achieving equity in health outcomesacross the populations in each country. The focus of priorityprograms must change to address equity rather than specifichealth problems if success is to be achieved. In Australia, the national peak body responsible for medicaland public health research and policy advice recently restructuredand reduced its capacity to fund the research that is necessaryto guide effective health promotion interventions and to providepolicy advice (1996 p. 396; 1998 p. 799).
There systems need to be maintainedand strengthen and be successin the following.
Ensuring that the health impact of decisions made by all sectorsis assessed and acted upon routinely.Disseminating and implementing sustained programs that incorporatecurrent knowledge of bestpractice.Engaging the personal health sector in actionto promote health (1998 p. 788).
In Australia there are some signs that the success in achievingpolicy and legislative changes across a range of sectors hasled to some concern that the importance of health educationas a vital component of comprehensive health promotion programsis being overlooked.The instability caused by constant restructuring within the health sector militates against the sustained investment in comprehensive programs that is needed for effective health promotion. For health promotion to succeed in the future,the priority health goals and targets will need to include thedeterminants of health, such as income, education and employment.This will provide a mandate for broadening the base from whichaction to promote health is taken, to include all governmentsectors as the non-government, private and communitysectors ensure that there is a much greater emphasison reducing inequalities in health.Priority will need to be given to restoring or building a senseof social cohesion and a sense of well-being across the population tocreating social capital, and nations will need to invest inboth institutional and community capacity to promote health(1997 p. 822). Within the health sector there will beneed for greater and sustained investment in the infrastructureand action needed to promote health. Creative use of the new communications technologies has thepotential to extend community participation in health promotion,to expand and share the information base, and to expand opportunitiesfor community and professional development. It will benecessary to ensure that there is powerful advocacy to securecontinuing investment in action to promote, protect and maintainthe health of the population.There will be need for further development of rangingseries of strategic alliances between the health sector andother sectors. It will mean the health sector identifying theorganizations and sectors with whom it shares interests, anddeveloping the skills and programs necessary to achieve sharedbenefits.
Presently, of critical importance will be to extend the debate beyond the academic, political and professional realms and engage citizens in the process of health reform. Although there needs to identify the organizational model that best fits their unique circumstances, the core values and approaches to health promotion including evidence regarding the effectiveness of health promotion interventions have global applicability to health systems.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment