What is Health Promotion?
Health promotion works to increase people’s control over their health, so that they can be healthier.
Lots of factors affect our health. These include:
- If our school, work and community environments make exercise and choosing healthy food easy
- If good mental health support is available
- The cost and availability of alcohol and tobacco
- If people understand how to be healthy and feel confident to take action
- People at increased risk of poor health are supported to stay healthy
To support people to have control over their health, health promotion must:
- Advocate for healthy policies
- Build evidence about ‘what works’
- Work in collaboration with the community and partner organisations
- Deliver programs that reduce risk factors for poor health
- Provide support to those at most risk of poor health
- Make health information understandable to everyone
Highlights for Health Promotion in 2021
A locally developed prevention program for local high schools students successfully reduces the risk of participants having a car crash for 10 years. A new paper was published by the American Academy of Pediatrics (aap.org), Youth Resilience Education and 13-Year Motor Vehicle Crash Risk . The paper details the 13-year independent evaluation led by researchers at Queensland University of Technology, George Institute for Global Health, and University of NSW. The study tracked almost 21,000 young drivers for more than a decade and found that drivers who took part in RRISK were 24 per cent less likely to have had any crash and 42 per cent less likely to crash at night than non-participants.
The RRISK program was developed by the health promotion team and has been delivered to year 11 students in the Northern Rivers region for over 20 years. RRISK teaches young people to plan ahead and support friends when driving and partying and takes a harm minimisation attitude to alcohol and recreational drug taking.
Challenges Faced in 2021.
Throughout most of 2021, Health Promotion has contributed around 10 FTE in staff for contact tracing to support the Test, Trace, Isolate and Quarantine (TTIQ) effort to reduce the spread of COVID19. This has disrupted most of Health Promotion programs and services and required those staff who are not contact tracing to double their efforts to attempt to meet some KPI targets. Some programs have successfully been replaced with online versions, including the RRISK program mentioned above.
Plans for 2022
At this stage, Health Promotion will continue to provide staff for contact tracing, with some fatigued staff being replaced by new recruits. Some face to face group programs will start up in Term 1, including the Stepping On falls prevention program for older people and other programs will continue online including Go4fun and Healthy and Active Online (healthy eating and exercise program for older people). The Health Promotion team will provide prevention and healthy lifestyle strategies to support the Integrated Care Plan.