Page 3303 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 16 August 2011
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income support. We have developed a number of strategies and plans to address some of the health issues that are identified in the report by ACTCOSS including those issues relating to socioeconomic and environmental factors which require across-government partnerships with agencies responsible for areas such as housing, education, family services, disability and planning and partnerships between clinicians and consumer and community groups.
I have just briefly mentioned the national partnership agreement on preventive health. I think there has been about $5.6 million in facilitation payments to the ACT through that national partnership which began in July 2010 and which will continue until June 2015. There are also reward payments which will be available to the ACT community on meeting the eight performance benchmarks outlined in the agreement.
Facilitation payments will fund the delivery of five different initiatives: social marketing, enabling infrastructure, healthy children, healthy workers and healthy communities. We have also secured commonwealth funding for the healthy communities initiative in March 2010 as one of the 12 pilot sites to receive funding through a local government area grant. This project is aimed at creating environments in north Canberra that maximise participation of at-risk target populations, for example, people who are disadvantaged and at risk of weight-related chronic disease, in dietary education, healthy lifestyle and physical activity programs.
We have already undertaken some consultation with local organisations. They have established two heart move groups and walking groups in collaboration with the Heart Foundation. There has been the promotion of cycling through cycle education and supporting community cycling events and the delivery of a number of nutrition education events in collaboration with community health dietitians, Nutrition Australia and the Red Cross FOODcents program. Of course, this program will grow, and funding for phase 2 of this initiative until June 2013 has been secured.
I think we need a bigger discussion, and probably in this place—and not wanting to tell committees what they should be doing, but I would imagine it may be an interesting subject for the health committee—on the broad-based population interventions that we do in this area where we spend quite a lot of money putting out promotional information and activities aimed at everyone across the community and weigh that up—I know this is a debate that happens in public health circles ad nauseum—against the opportunities that present to a community like the ACT if you were to target those specific interventions to particular population groups.
When you look at some of the data that we get through the Chief Health Officer’s report or even talking to the Chief Health Officer himself—and I do not think he has an answer on what is the best way to go—I think it is time to have a look at whether we put more effort into targeted preventive health initiatives here in the ACT and that we identify particular groups that we would like to work with. For example, we set ourselves a target and we resource a reduction in smoking rates amongst our Indigenous population as one of those ideas but also how we target our education around obesity and physical activity.
At the moment we fund multiple little programs with small bits of money that I am sure make some impact, but would they make the same impact if you pulled that
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