Australia: the healthiest country by 2020
National Preventative Health Strategy – the roadmap for action
7.4 - Staging change
- 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
Reaching the targets we have set for Australia to become the healthiest nation in 2020 is ambitious but achievable. Each incremental step over the years to 2020 will need to be carefully monitored and built on to achieve the end goal, recognising that not all approaches can be introduced at once.
After nearly 60 years experience, we know what works in tobacco control. Comprehensive action across a number of strategies (for example, public education, taxation, legislation, regulation, rigorous monitoring, research and evaluation) has resulted in significant falls in smoking prevalence and changes in public attitudes to smoking.
We also have many years of experience in addressing alcohol problems, particularly drink driving, although there is still a long way to go to having a safer culture of drinking in Australia, including public perceptions of high-risk drinking and the secondary effects experienced by families and communities.
Tackling obesity is a comparatively new task. As part of the comprehensive approach proposed, it will be important to place a special emphasis on further building the evidence base so that the most cost-effective and efficient interventions are pursued systematically. In this area in particular, interventions will need to be staged over time. For example, some community-based obesity prevention programs will need to start as trials, underpinned by research and thorough evaluation, before being scaled across the country. Similarly, in areas such as the regulation of food advertising, an approach using responsive regulation is required, beginning with an evaluation of self-regulation, moving to co-regulation and independent regulation and legislation where stronger measures are required. This follows the cyclical ‘do, measure, report – do, measure, report’ approach to staged change and partnership approaches.
The figures below illustrate the progressive, determined and iterative processes, using multiple strategies over time, which has proved so successful for tobacco and road trauma.
- Figure 1.4: