Health is an integral issue in any society that wishes to witness growth in its social, religious, and economic sectors. It is against this reason that the Australian government has put in place a strategy that will ensure that its citizens live healthy lives free from infections.
The strategy, therefore, focuses on providing priorities, a road map, and a method of action that will ensure that the nation becomes the healthiest by the year 2020. It calls upon all the sectors and the Australian people to embrace the vision, take the call for action, and purposely work towards saving lives and improving the wellbeing and health status of the citizens (Schultz et al., 2009). It targets primary prevention that addresses health issues in every sector.
A task force has been put in place to see into it that this strategy is realized. Therefore, this task force has set up a preventive health program and is trying to balance between the urgency of taking an action and the magnitude of the troubling health issues (Humphreys et al., 2008). Hence it is important to be fully aware that the set goals and strategies cannot be attained at once. It is against this background that this essay will shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of this strategy and critically analyze it concerning socio-environment and health promotion perspectives.
Health promotion refers to a process that seeks to empower individuals so that they can be able to manage and improve their health ( Ritsatakis, 2009).
Through health promotion, the strategy firmly proposes the need for the government, non-governmental organizations, and volunteers to join hands to attain the vision of having a healthy nation. Moreover, mechanisms have been put in place to ensure that the strategy is achieved. These mechanisms prove the strength of the strategy as it shall be explored in this essay.
To begin with, the strategy calls upon the Australian people to make healthy living their priority. This is important because an individual will be able to make easier and healthy choices that will work towards achieving good health and reducing the burden of illness affecting the socio-economic sectors and also the aging group (Ritsatakis 2009).
To enhance people’s ability to make healthy choices, the government has come up with plans that will make it easier to overcome any barriers that may emerge to stop an individual from making healthy choices. When healthy choices are made, a significant reduction of the obese and the overweight people in Australia will be seen, the accelerating levels of smocking will be reduced and the resulting health problems, as well as the social harm, shall be addressed.
Therefore, individual Australians must scale up their efforts to make living healthy lives a reality. Besides, overcoming barriers in making healthy choices, several priorities have been put forth by the strategy that will help people reduce the intake of alcohol to safer levels, prevent being exposed to smoking as well as help individuals maintain a healthy weight (Labonte,1992).
It is through health promotions the government and other organizations are attaining this health strategy. For instance, the organizations concerned with health promotion have ensured that prerequisite health infrastructure and services are accessed by people while making healthy choices. They include elements like equity and social justice, food, shelter, education, a stable eco-system, sustainable resources among others (Ritsatakis, 2009).
Also, the government has put in place other methods to make this achievable by creating a supportive environment, building healthy public policies, ensuring that community actions have been strengthened, reorienting health services, and providing information for developing of personal skills needed to cope with the challenges of making healthy choices.
Making personal healthy choices, however, cannot be very reliable if it is depended upon as a strategy to vision 2020 of a healthy Australia. This is because it draws several challenges that vary from the willingness of an individual to drop some strong and deeply rooted habits to the slow process of bringing about a personal change (Henderson, 2007).
To shed light on the weakness of this wonderful idea of making healthy choices, it is observed that it does not fully show how big the problem is. Obesity, overweight and excessive use of alcohol is escalating each passing day. The harmful effects of obesity, tobacco, and alcohol add up to over 30% in terms of disease burden in Australia (Labonte, 1992).
Hence, there is a need for action to be urgently taken to curb these and other contributing factors that claims the lives of the Australians and to save those who are still alive and whose life expectancy is being reduced each day by their unhealthy choices, make early interventions and put urgent and appropriate measures in place (Labonte,1992).
Secondly, the strategy aims at ensuring that people, other than making healthy choices, take prevention as their concern. The strategy has an agenda that calls for the intervention of all sectors across the economy and in the nation such as education, welfare, justice, housing, community, and families among others. This provides support towards effective and urgent action to realize the goal of having a healthy nation. The public, too, has been involved in this process (Schultz et al., 2009).
This is intended to happen when all the sectors and the people will offer support in all ways. For instance, the support can be social whereby the communities and other sectors will network to enhance health promotion. To achieve this, the support needs to be equitable, reciprocal, and comprehensive by showing empathy assurances, advice, material support, respect, and a sense of belonging (Humphreys et al., 2008).
Upon achieving this, both the poor and rich in their respective circumstances will largely benefit from self-esteem due to good health. In making prevention everyone’s business, the strategy calls for personal empowerment of each individual to enhance the perception of control and power and be able to fully develop health-wise (Henderson, 2007).
There is also the need for the small groups to provide support for lifestyle choices to help promote personal behavior change and improve social support. The strategy also calls for political action. This is by practicing democracy in participation in matters of health, supporting broad-based social movements, and creating a vision of a better, manageable, preferred future (Ramsay, 1996).
The strategy should also advocate for public policies that target healthy living alongside promoting collaborations and proper conflict resolutions to achieve consensus. Moreover, the strategy should seek to develop local actions attached to community levels, lower conflicts to manageable levels, and have critical professional and community dialogue. All these and many other plans in making health the business of the society is indeed a huge step in realizing the vision (Whiteford, Buckingham & Manderscheid, 2002).
However, when making health the business of the society, it is pertinent to note that currently, there are quite several factors that if not properly handled would continue acting as weak points and a hindrance to achieving the vision 2020. These issues range from psychological factors to morbidity and mortality.
For instance, there are a number of individuals who are living in isolation, they are so poor, and have low self-esteem (Humphrey& Murray, 1994). Some lack social support, work in dangerous polluted environment and have low economic power. Basically the strategy will have to come up with a working plan that will go down to heart of where these individuals are and address the issues like closing the gap between the rich and the poor, social discriminations, improvement of better working conditions and discriminations on age, sex and race (Ramsay, 1996).
Some of these issues have been long in history and well known to hinder full success. Therefore, as much as there can be willingness to make positive changes, a better environment must be there, failure to which success will be limited.
Third, the strategy is concerned with the health of the population, equity and interventions at all levels. It is therefore giving out a population an approach to health that will require the analysis of health, priority setting, taking action and evaluating results (Humphrey & Murray, 1994).
This will help reduce health inequities and to improve the health of the entire population. The approach covers the social, political, economic and cultural factors making health to be seen as a resource so important for the growth of a nation’s economy. Population health is therefore significant. The strategy aims at improving the health of the population now and before 2020. This the strategy intends to accomplish by improving the social status, social gradient and ways of acquiring income of the population, offer food security, access to health services, education on health issue, better and safe working conditions among other things (Henderson, 2007).
The strategy also needs to set in place viable healthcare infrastructure, how resources will be allocated and the workforce (Ramsay, 1996). Currently, it has also set forth public health strategies that its spectrum is great in involves interventions on preventing of a sickness, detecting it early, screening, treating and managing it.
This strategy on population health is on the other hand, faced with the challenge of inequity and inequalities (Humphrey& Murray, 1994). Along the implementation of the strategy, there is bound to arise one or another form of injustice. Such issues like social gradient and low socioeconomic status, social exclusion, food insecurity, unemployment, underemployment and poor working conditions will pose as huge challenges and setbacks to making this a reality (Henderson, 2007).
In conclusion, the health strategy in Australia that will make the nation the healthiest by the year 2020, with all its strengths and weaknesses expressed above requires the participation and the commitment of the whole community in order to make it a reality. Equity should be advocated for in all sectors, harmful products be banned, better living and working conditions and environment be created, investments be done in better health, tackling inequities in health sector and bridging the healthcare gap.
There is also the need for the government to be committed to ensure that public health issues like housing and settlement, environmental pollution and occupational hazards are looked into. Furthermore, better settlement programs and sanitation facilities should be put in place. It should also ensure that people are provided for and supported financially or with any other means to enable them stay healthy in addition to voicing issues affecting them.
References
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Humphrey,J. S & Murray, D.(1994). The National Rural Health Strategy Australian Journal of Rural Health. 2(3), 25-28.
Humphreys J, et al. (2008). ‘Beyond workforce: A systemic solution for primary health service provision in small rural and remote communities. Medical Journal of Australia. 188(8), 77-80.
Labonte, R. (1992). Heart health inequalities in Canada: Models, theory and planning. Health Promotion International, 7(2), 119-127.
Ramsay, J. (1996). The national mental health strategy. Australian Journal of Rural Health, 4(1), 53–56.
Ritsatakis, A. (2009). Equity and social determinants of health that a city level. Health Promotion International. 24, 81-88.
Schultz, M. et al. (2009). Australia: The Healthiest Country by 2020–National Preventative Health Strategy-the roadmap for action. Barton: Commonwealth of Australia.
Whiteford, H., Buckingham, B. & Manderscheid, R. (2002). Australia’s National Mental Health Strategy. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 180, 210-215.