Health Promotion

Health Promotion practice seeks to improve the health of the population by improving people’s well-being preventing disease and injuries as an essential part of North Coast Area Health Service activities.

Through a range of strategies, health promotion works to create environments that support well-being, to enable people to increase control over their health, to reduce inequities in health outcomes and to prevent chronic disease.

Health Promotion can also make a major contribution to the quality of life of people through strategies that target health literacy, patient empowerment and support self care. North Coast Health Promotion activities are undertaken in a number of areas such as drug and alcohol, Aboriginal health, obesity prevention, fall injury prevention, tobacco control and health promoting schools.

Our work requires us to look at the community as a whole and identify a wide variety of strategies. Some target specific age groups, others look at a specific cultural group, or a setting like preschools to reach parents, children.

Health Promotion on the North Coast is a joint effort between dedicated health promotion officers, a wide variety of clinicians; government and non-government organizations and the wider community that help shape health promotion programs.