Health promotion in Australia: Reviewing the past and looking to the future

Abstract

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 organisational capacity (including a specialist workforce) within the health sector (including the non-government and community sectors), although total financial investment as a proportion of total recurrent health expenditure remains consistently below 2%. However, despite its significant successes, health promotion in Australia has had little impact on improving the health of Indigenous Australians. Closing the 17-year gap in life expectancy is one of the greatest challenges facing health promotion in the future–necessitating a much more substantial investment in working across sectors to redistribute the social determinants of health, including political power.

Keywords:

• health promotion
• theory
• practice
• infrastructure
• inequality
• politics