Australia: the healthiest country by 2020
National Preventative Health Strategy – the roadmap for action
Supporting infrastructure for all phases
Table of contents
- Chair's Foreword
Chapter 1: Building preventative health in Australian communities
1 - Vision, purpose and call to action- 2 - Australia’s response to the call to action
- 3 - The need for action
- 4 - What we know: prevention works
- 5 - Taking action
- 6 - A conceptual framework for the Strategy
- 7 - The roadmap for prevention
- 8 - Ensuring effective implementation
- 9 - Conclusion – a call to action
- References
- Chapter 2: Obesity in Australia: A need for urgent action
- Chapter 3: Tobacco: Towards world’s best practice in tobacco control
- Chapter 4: Alcohol: Reshaping the drinking culture in Australia
- Appendices
The establishment of the National Prevention Agency (NPA)
- Establish the NPA as an independent agency able to translate broad policy intent into evidence-based strategies with built-in evaluation and the capacity to leverage a range of policy levers and partners, both within and outside government
- Appoint an expert, cross-sectoral Board of Governance of the Agency
- The Taskforce recommends that the NPA:
- Provides a national clearing house for the monitoring and evaluation of national policies and programs in preventative health
- Publishes annual reports on the state of preventative health, including reporting on progress towards the achievement of the 2020 goals specified in this Strategy
- Advises COAG, through the Australian Health Ministers Conference (AHMC), on national priorities and options for preventative health
- Administers national programs, facilitates national partnerships, and advises on national infrastructure for surveillance, monitoring, research and evaluation (see below), as charged by AHMC
- Develops for consideration by AHMC the next phase of preventative health reform to follow after this Strategy
- Has an increased capacity and budget to that currently envisaged in the COAG agreement on preventive health
- NPA to develop a web-based clearing house/register for organisational policies, plans and achievements in order to share good practice across the country
- NPA to commission/conduct from time to time surveys of activities undertaken by different sectors, and barriers to and enablers of action, and to report on these
- Develop national recognition and award scheme for outstanding contributions, large and small, to making Australia the healthiest country by 2020
Social marketing
- NPA to develop and implement a comprehensive, sustained social marketing strategy to increase healthy eating and physical activity, and reduce sedentary behaviour
- NPA to develop and implement effective and sustained national social marketing campaigns at levels of reach demonstrated to reduce smoking, drawing on successful state campaigns as appropriate
- NPA to develop and implement a comprehensive and sustained social marketing and public education strategy, building on the National Binge Drinking Campaign and state campaigns
Data, surveillance and monitoring
- Implement and extend the National Health Risk Survey Program, funded under the COAG Agreement on Preventive Health
- Comprehensive national surveillance systems for obesity, tobacco and alcohol are essential tools for the purposes of collecting and managing relevant datasets, monitoring progress against specified targets and reporting trend information over time. To be effective, these systems should have the capacity to:
- Collect and report against behavioural, environmental and biomedical risk factors relevant to obesity, tobacco and alcohol
- Expand and incorporate newly identified and/or revised indicators into datasets as required and appropriate
- Become permanent systems of data collection undertaken at predetermined regular intervals
- Provide representative data for the whole of population and also populations of interest (for example, Indigenous, children and adolescents, disadvantaged)
- Complement and build upon other existing data collection and monitoring mechanisms as required and appropriate
National research infrastructure
- Establish:
- A National Strategic Framework for preventative health research
- A preventative health strategic research fund
- A national preventative health research register
- Develop a network of prevention research centres which would:
- Partner with community interventions in the region they serve, with NGOs and other collaborators
- Have a national specialty role (for example, in obesity, tobacco or alcohol, school settings or disadvantaged populations)
- Have a workforce development role in education, research and intervention practice
- NPA to foster leadership, mentoring and knowledge sharing across the prevention research centres, including hosting an annual symposium to share research findings, methods and ideas
Workforce development
- NPA to oversee as a matter of priority a national audit of the prevention workforce outlined in the 2008–09 COAG Agreement on Preventive Health; strategy arising from the audit to be brought to AHMC for implementation
- Ensure prevention becomes an important part of the work of Health Workforce Australia Agency
Future funding models for prevention
- NPA to investigate and provide advice in regard to the potential development of a funding framework for prevention, both within and external to the health sector