“Health Promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over and to improve their health. It moves beyond a focus on individual behaviour towards a wide range of social and environmental interventions.” – World Health Organization, 2016

Our Health Promotion team works to tackle health inequalities and improve health across the population of the East Metropolitan Health Service (EMHS). 

The leading causes of death for the EMHS catchment population are heart disease, various cancers, and stroke. The major causes of illness for those in the EMHS catchment area include diabetes, heart disease and a range of cancers. These diseases occur more often in socioeconomically disadvantaged people, the Aboriginal community and other vulnerable populations.

These chronic diseases share five common modifiable risk factors: smoking, poor nutrition, physical inactivity, overweight and obesity, and harmful alcohol use. Small changes in these risk factors can result in significant health gains.

These are the risk factors the EMHS Health Promotion team focuses on by using a population health approach. As such, interventions will focus on the whole population in addition to targeted approaches for vulnerable communities.