Australia: the healthiest country by 2020
National Preventative Health Strategy - Overview
The Strategy – summarised, prioritised and phased
- Chair's Foreword
- The purpose of the Strategy; What is in the Strategy?
- The need for urgent, comprehensive, prioritised and sustained action; What will be different because of the Strategy?
- Prevention works; Progressive, staged and comprehensive action
The Strategy – summarised, prioritised and phased- The conceptual framework for the Preventative Health Strategy
Strategic directions- Ensuring effective implementation – the national infrastructure for prevention
- Conclusion – a call to action
- References
- Acknowledgements
What follows is a presentation of the most important actions in each of the areas of obesity, tobacco and alcohol. Detailed implementation plans for obesity, tobacco and alcohol describing a full set of actions, responsibilities, phasing and measures are set out in the Strategy document.
The actions are phased and sequenced over time, as it will not be possible or appropriate to initiate all actions in phase one. Phasing is also needed if evidence of effective interventions is lacking. For example, large community-based obesity prevention trials, underpinned by expert research and evaluation, are needed before they can be applied nationwide.
For areas such as regulation of food advertising to children or alcohol promotion and sponsorship, an approach using responsive regulation is required. This begins with the most persuasive self-regulatory approaches, and escalates to enforced legislation if the voluntary forms are unsuccessful.
The first phase sets in place the urgent priority actions. The second phase builds on these actions, learning from new research, the experiences of program implementation and the national trials carried out in the first phase. The third phase ensures long-term and sustained action, again based on learnings from the first two phases.
As a means to encouraging and supporting action across Australia the Taskforce proposes the establishment of an online national forum for organisations, local governments, businesses and industry, community groups, families and individuals to share their commitments and plans to making Australia the healthiest country.
This will be complemented by the development of a national recognition and award scheme for outstanding contributions, large and small, to making Australia the healthiest country by 2020.