Probably the primary piece in terms of public health education that we did deliver was A Warning Signs of Heart Attack Campaign which ran from 2012 through to 2015.
It was a mass media campaign combined with a push to clinicians as well around getting people to understand the warning signs of heart attack and to act quickly once those warning signs had been recognized.
The key to that was obviously through the media and actually getting out there and actually running advertising.
Those are more of a population health approach to this problem around warning signs of heart attack.
We do certain targeted education as well so we do have our Absolute Cardiovascular Risk which is focussed at Practice Nurses and General Practitioners as well as Aboriginal Health Practitioners.
That is around getting that cohort to assess patients on their risk of having a heart attack within the next five years.
Looking at diabetes, blood pressure, smoking status, height and weight and then calculating out of risk of having a heart attack for the patient over the next five years
We also continue to do education in Hypertension Guidelines.
When our guidelines come out around acute coronary syndrome or hypertension we work with people like the Primary Health Network and our cardiologist and our general practice network to ensure that we hold our education sessions to make sure that sector is up to date with the latest guidelines coming forth.
We have a variety of ways that we provide education.
We have a Youth Suicide Prevention and Education Program and the clients tend to be a variety of people, whether that is schoolchildren and to focus on youth or professionals working with youth to educate them.
Some of the courses that we deliver our Youth Mental Health First Aid, Mental Health First Aid, Safe Talk because I think the more people in the community who are aware of mental illness and how to keep people well and promote good mental health the better
In a less formal way, the sorts of education that we provide would be for example the Carers Program that we have.
We might have a range of allied health professionals come in whether it is a psychologist or an OT to educate them on how to be better prepared in their caring role.
They might not be too aware of the effects of medication for example for the person that they're caring for, if we can help them understand that better through a psychologist coming in and having a chat to them about that or someone who's across an area that they are struggling with.
They are the sorts of education that we can do, as well.
Then generally in our adult based programs different types of education can be provided whether that's life skills, gaining employment, how to do a CV, practical life skills that people need as well in terms of educating there.
Health education is really based on sexual reproductive health, that's what our main focus is and it's definitely accredited courses we teach. We teach doctors, nurses and we have health workers in attending our training programs. What’s worked is we do a lot of that training face-to-face.
A part of our training is in a 2 tier about theory competency and in a clinical environment. We have to offer a clinical service to help train student nurses and doctors who have undertaken a theory and health education/ education programs.
When we are speaking with our cancer clients we are always promoting healthy eating and exercise. We obviously always continue to promote cancer screening that is available; any type of screening that is available and exercise as well.
In my role, the main type of health education I provide is under the umbrella of prevention. At Cancer Council we promote all the different lifestyle factors that contribute to reducing someone's risk of cancer. These can range from things like healthy eating, exercise, as well as being SunSmart, not smoking, you are probably pretty familiar with a lot of these kind of messages and these are the kind of main messages that we promote.
Another big one is also screening programs as well, so we promote all the Cancer Council supported screening programs which include breast screening, cervical cancer screening, skin cancer screening as well as bowel cancer screening. They are the four Cancer Council supported screening programs that we promote.
It's something that we've been doing for some years.We've shortened our courses, over time we've learned that we used to have two and three week courses and people having time out now is just too challenged and we have looked for a number of years of putting half those programs online but we just don't have the money yet to make that happen. There's a new world out there and training in different ways face-to-face or online or webinars. We’ve thought about it and that's a future for us but at the moment we're still doing some face-to-face and we're still getting the numbers to attend the training programs because some people like that environment of learning.
Every now and then we'll just do a half day workshop and their updates for medical staff, I mean we have a pharmacist that is coming and undertaking some training programs. We’ve had social workers we had youth and Disability Support Workers we've had a guardianship workers we've had prison officers.
Sexual and reproductive health is a topic in so many environments in fact I think it's in every single workplace. Even schools have come to us to address students because there's been maybe a rape in an year 9 class. So the issues are coming across every day. Even Victoria family planning has worked really successfully with sports stars and so they've gone to the sports AFL and the NRL clubs and given men's health programs. There's different ways of getting to different groups and at the moment our education is very reliant on how many human resources we have so if we had the more funding we would offer more.
I think to make health education successful; it needs to come from the participants themselves.
Education historically tends to be a little bit authoritative in nature but I think if we can ask a participant, what they want education on, what is missing in their life, what do they need and also what are their strengths that we can build on.
Rather than saying, I know this and you do not, therefore let me educate you.
I think we need to be person-centered in the way that we deliver education and make sure it is actually meeting the needs of the people we're working with.
I guess with anything to be successful with education delivery, maybe getting them to repeat what you said to them, and giving them the knowledge such as this is where you go and get your bowel screening kit, this is how often you need to have pap smears and that sort of thing. You’re giving them the knowledge, I think to help promote them to be successful.
I think it's really important to try and encourage repetition as much as possible in health education programs and not just doing things the once off, but building a bit more of a sustainable program and having follow-up action within the programs in order to really have an impact.
Also I would say it is really important to tailor the program to specific organizations because not all the health messages we have will be appropriate for every subgroup in the population