Marilyn Wise

UNSW Sydney | UNSW · Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity

People from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds are more likely to have low health literacy and less appropriate access to health services than other Australians. Interventions to improve health literacy have demonstrated moderate improvements in health service use. Most of these interventions focus on simplifying communication as opposed t...

Questions persist regarding implementation of mental health promotion, prevention, and early intervention initiatives in schools. To date, attention has targeted the ‘Whats’ and ‘Hows’ in design and implementation. Ongoing clarification of ‘Who’ the key proponents are working in this space receives less consideration. This paper presents outcomes f...

For almost 20 years public health leaders and organizations in Australia have supported the development of HIA. Some of the world’s first HIA guidance was developed in Australia. Despite this it has been difficult to locate a ‘home’ for HIA in Australian policy and planning processes. While EIA has long been mandated in legislation at state and fed...

Although participation and empowerment are hallmarks of the WHO vision of health promotion, it is acknowledged that they are difficult to evaluate. Devising adequate study designs, indicators and methods for the assessment of participation and empowerment should consider the experiences, concerns and constraints of health promotion practitioners. T...

The prevalence of smoking among the adult Aboriginal population is almost double that of the non-Aboriginal population. Research shows smoking cessation brief interventions have a positive impact on quit attempts. However, examples of statewide, Aboriginal-led initiatives that ensure health service delivery of brief intervention to all Aboriginal c...

The authors of the Ottawa Charter selected the words enable, mediate and advocate to describe the core activities in what was, in 1986, the new Public Health. This article considers these concepts and the values and ideas upon which they were based. We discuss their relevance in the current context within which health promotion is being conducted,...

This paper reports on the evaluation of a culturally specific smoking cessation training program (SmokeCheck) for health professionals working in Aboriginal health in NSW. Training aimed to increase professionals' knowledge, skills and confidence to offer an evidence-based quit smoking brief intervention to Aboriginal clients. Using a quasi-experim...

To identify the factors that contribute to the under-resourcing of Aboriginal health and to explore the impact that funding arrangements have on the implementation of Aboriginal health policy. DESIGN, SETTINGS AND PARTICIPANTS: Qualitative study based on 35 in-depth interviews with a purposive sample of frontline health professionals involved in he...

There is increased interest in, and awareness of, the health impacts of urban and land-use planning. At the same time, health impact assessment (HIA) has emerged internationally as an approach to strengthening the possible positive impacts of a proposed development or plan and mitigating the possible negative health impacts. This article first prov...

To achieve health equity means that we must be concerned with creating equal opportunities for health and with bringing health differentials down to the lowest level possible. Jones points to the need to address the social determinants of health and the social determinants of equity. Each requires different actions on the part of the health sector...

Within the discipline of health promotion there has been long-standing understanding of the social determinants of health and life expectancy.1-3 There is also long-standing evidence of the unfair, unjust distribution of these resources within and among societies. It has proven difficult to translate this evidence of the need for the fairer distrib...

The Oxford Textbook of Public Health is the ultimate resource on the subject of public health and epidemiology. With contributors drawn from across the world, offering perspectives from vastly different health systems, with ranging public health needs and priorities, this book offers a globally comprehensive picture of modern health.

Residents of socioeconomically disadvantaged locations are more likely to have poor health than residents of socioeconomically advantaged locations and this has been comprehensively mapped in Australian cities. These inequalities present a challenge for the public health workers based in or responsible for improving the health of people living in d...

Competency identification. The report on mapping of competency identification.

Selected tables. Selected Tables from Locational Disadvantage: Focusing on Place to Improve Health [9].

This article explores the role of professional values and the culture of the Australian health care system in facilitating and constraining the implementation of an Aboriginal health policy. Thirty-five semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted in a case study on the implementation of the Northern Territory Preventable Chronic Disease Stra...

Although the concepts of participation and empowerment are hallmarks of the WHO vision of health promotion, it is acknowledged that they are difficult to evaluate. Devising adequate study designs, indicators and methods for the assessment of participation and empowerment should take into account the experiences, concerns, working conditions and con...

Over the last three decades Australia has very successfully adopted and applied the values, methods, and practice of health promotion to improve the average life expectancy and health of the population. Australia has, also, been part of and contributed to the global evolution of the field of health promotion. There is, now, substantial organisation...

Hintergrund: Empowerment ist ein Kernkonzept der WHO-Vision von Gesundheitsförderung. Die Evaluation von Empowerment erweist sich aber als schwierig. Bei der Entwicklung angemessener Studiendesigns, Indikatoren und Methoden für die Messung und Bewertung von Empowerment sollten die Erfahrungen, Bedenken und alltäglichen Rahmenbedingungen von Praktik...

Thirty-five interviews were conducted in a case study on the implementation of the Northern Territory Preventable Chronic Disease Strategy (PCDS) to explore the role of the health workforce in the implementation of Aboriginal health policy. There was a tendency for the workforce to implement those aspects of the policy that drew on existing skills...

Promoting mental health is a relatively new initiative being taken across the world, stimulated by concerns about the global burden of mental illness, inequalities in mental health and debate about the relationship between quality of life and economic growth. Social factors influence the health of populations but the distribution of these is determ...

Community-based health promotion (CBHP) aims at mobilising citizens for health-related issues in their environment, and at implementing health-promoting projects on the community level. Whereas recent political decisions support this approach, scientific studies dealing with theories and consequences of CBHP are scarce in Germany. Evaluation of CBH...

There is increasing worldwide recognition of the need for government policies to address the recent increases in the incidence and prevalence of childhood obesity. The complexity and inter-relatedness of the determinants of obesity pose a genuine policy challenge, both scientifically and politically. This study examines the characteristics of one o...

The Ottawa Charter has been remarkably influential in guiding the development of the goals and concepts of health promotion, and in shaping global public health practice in the past 20 years. However, of the five action areas identified in the Ottawa Charter, it appears that there has been little systematic attention to the challenge of re-orientin...

The success in recent years of many IUHPE initiatives provides cause for celebration, but also reminds us of the challenges that lie ahead. The Global Programme for Health Promotion Effectiveness provides a blueprint for how the IUHPE can effectively participate in, and lead, global networks for health. Health promotion research is well organized a...

Systems for planning are a critical component of the infrastructure for public health. Both in Australia and internationally there is growing interest in how planning processes might best be strengthened to improve health outcomes for communities. In Australia the delivery of public health varies across states, and mandated municipal public health...

This paper reviews approaches to the mapping of resources needed to engage in health promotion at the country level. There is not a single way, or a best way to make a capacity map, since it should speak to the needs of its users as they define their needs. Health promotion capacity mapping is therefore approached in various ways. At the national l...

In the past few years, significant advances have been made in health promotion to generate readily accessible systematic reviews of evidence on the effectiveness of interventions and programs. The influence of this evidence on policy and practice has, however, been unpredictable, and proponents of evidence-based practice are identifying ways to inc...

Welcome to this issue of the Health Promotion Journal of Australia, which focuses on Indigenous health promotion. More than a year ago, the Journal editors issued an invitation for authors to submit papers on any aspect of health promotion relating to Indigenous peoples; this issue is the result. The Editors' role in the process of reviewing, reque...

Evaluation continues to present health promotion researchers, practitioners, and policy makers with many challenges—conceptual, theoretical, and practical. All organizations and individuals involved in health promotion are familiar with the pressure from inside and outside the field to demonstrate that health promotion “works”. Proving that health...

When the interim editorial team took over from the former Editors in September 2002, there were many aspects of the production and editing process for us to understand. This initial period also involved setting up a new system of administration that would clearly track all correspondence with authors and reviewers.

Introduction: Since the 1980s, when health promotion started differentiating itself from health education and became mainstream in multidisciplinary public health, professional development issues have been an important and recurring theme. Workforce surveys have been conducted, consensus on core skills for health promotion has been sought, training...

Introduction: A knowledgeable, skilled health promotion workforce is a key component of the capacity needed by nations to promote the health of their populations. The nature of health promotion (the discipline or area of practice), however, makes workforce development a complex issue. Questions such as who is in the health promotion workforce, what...

Promoting the health of populations in the 21st century continues to be a significant challenge to the field of health promotion. The growing inequalities in health that have occurred in the past two decades, within countries and between countries, are cause for grave concern on the part of citizens and governments everywhere.

For many people, access to the prerequisites for health outlined in the preamble to the Ottawa Charter: peace, shelter, education, food, income, a stable ecosystem, sustainable resources, social justice and equity, continues to be a distant dream. Despite ‘major efforts by governments and international financial institutions in the latter half of t...

Over the past 25 years health promotion activists have developed tested refined and disseminated strategies to improve the effectiveness of health promotion action. However during the Global Conference on Health Promotion held in Mexico City June 5-9 2000 WHO Director General Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland implied that health promotion has been narrow w...

Strengthening advocacy for social and economic policy that promotes the health and well-being of populations and that ensures a sustainable environment are major challenges for health promotion in the 21st century. Although advocacy is known as a powerful strategy for promoting health there has been much less success in using advocacy to reduce ine...

This paper describes and analyses the development of health promotion in Australia and New Zealand. It argues that health promotion has become an established approach to addressing public health problems in both nations over the past two decades. The paper documents the mixed progress both countries have made in improving the health of their popula...

For many readers the term ‘capacity building’ may appear abstract and even obscure. The articles in this issue will explain the idea, and show its relevance to public health. The idea of ‘building capacity’ is not unique or specific to public health or health promotion. We could equally be discussing Australia’s defence capacity and ways in which i...

From the early 1970s Australia began to invest much of its public health effort in programmes to address the chronic diseases that were being identified, increasingly, as public health problems. By the mid 1990s there was growing evidence that sustained investment could result in improvements in the health of the population.

SUMMARY Despite repeated expressions of concern, both academic researchers and programme delivery practitioners have neglected the dissemination of new knowledge about health promotion programmes. This has meant that effective programmes are often not implemented as widely as they could be and that health promotion programmes are not achieving thei...

Improving the health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations is the greatest challenge facing public health in Australia today. The gains in the health of the population overall have not been matched by gains among these communities. Much of the information about the health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and peopl...

In 1994, Australian Health Ministers agreed that promoting mental health and preventing mental illness was one of the four priority national health goals [1], Australia's National Mental Health Strategy includes among its aims the promotion of mental health and prevention of mental illness [2]. To date, the main focus of activity under the Strategy...

In recent years several countries and regions within countries have developed national health goals and targets in order to make explicit the achievements they expect from their investment in health, as a guide to health policy development, and/or to assist in decisions about resource allocation. These health targets have been developed using d...

In July 1995 the Federal Minister for Health commissioned the National Health and Medical Research Committee (NHMEC) to conduct a "comprehensive review and analysis of past and current health promotion initiatives in Australia, and of the systems within which health promotion occurs".

The situation of health educators in Australia is described and credentialing issues discussed in this context. The dynamic growth of health promotion as a specific field of practice has meant that there is an unresolved and continuing debate about the pros and cons of credentialing. The climate created by the rhetoric of health promotion in Austra...

This survey aimed to assess the prevalence and knowledge of coronary risk factors and self-perceived coronary heart disease risk among Greek-Australians in the Marrickville area of inner Sydney. A random sample of 834 household addresses was selected from the 2,403 households having Greek-Australian surnames on the electoral roll. In each household...

This survey, carried out in an area where there are good family planning services, demonstrates that such surveys can be successfully carried out in New Zealand where so far there is little data on contraceptive practice and pregnancy planning. This article compares failure rates of several contraceptive methods and shows that most women in the sur...