Health Promotion - A General Overview

Prime Time 1 The BNPCA recognises that people's personal attributes, behaviours and life circumstances as well as their social, environmental and economic conditions influence and contribute to their health and well-being. A social model of health underpins the activities of the BNPCA.
The social model of health concentrates on improving the health and well being of a population through addressing the social and environmental determinants of ill health together with biological and medical factors which influence health and well being.
Capacity building is a key feature of future PCP activity and involves the development of sustainable skills, organisational structures, resources and commitment to health improvement in health and other sectors. It can occur both within a specific program and as part of broad agency and system development. The 5 key action areas to build capacity to promote health and wellbeing have been identified as:
 * Organisation Development
 * Workforce Development
 * Resources
 * Partnership
 * Leadership
The BNPCA has established an Integrated Health Promotion Forum that meets each Quarter to address IHP initiatives across the catchment and ensures the evaluation and dissemination of information on priority issues. Organisation Development activities since late 2005 have seen significant structural and operational changes as reflected in our Dynamic IHP Model

Vision


 To work in partnership with key stakeholders to address the determinants of health: and to impact positively on health and wellbeing in communities in Banyule and Nillumbik. This will be achieved by maximising the health promotion efforts of member agencies and through effective catchment planning, implementation and evaluation.

Guiding principles


 1. We will share expertise and information
 2. We will coordinate our efforts to create enhanced outcomes
 3. We will ensure that our activities and projects will contribute to and be guided by an overall health promotion plan for the catchment area

Priority areas for action 2006-2009


 Physical activity
Emotional wellbeing and social connectedness
 These will be progressed through the operations of the current BNPCA Physical Activity Network and its Emotional Wellbeing Network

Catchment Planning


 To support Integrated Health Promotion implementation, DHS introduced catchment planning for all PCP member agencies. Catchment planning aims to:
 * Move toward a population health approach for health promotion program activity.
 * Strengthen collaborative partnerships
 * Improve the quality of integrated approaches to health promotion planning, implementation, evaluation and dissemination.
To meet the department’s requirements for IHP and the use of PCP IHP funding, PCP agencies are required to:
 * Facilitate catchment-wide planning for IHP
 * Use the IHP guiding principles and common planning framework to guide catchment priority setting and planning processes
 * Provide leadership and support in the planning process and actively contribute to catchment priority setting for IHP
 * Coordinate and support capacity building strategies, such as workforce development, to improve integrated approaches to health promotion practice
 * Coordinate the evaluation of the IHP catchment activity
To Find out More about Integrated Health Promotion and Catchment Planning in BNPCA please contact
 Anita Gibbons
 Integrated Health Promotion & Planning Officer
 Phone: 9450 2615 E-mail: anita.gibbons@bchs.org.au

Attachment: IHP Dynamic Model