About

Healthy Communities Mid North Coast has a representative membership from various organisations across the Mid North Coast Region. For more member information click here.

The purpose of Healthy Communities Mid North Coast is to help build healthy communities based on the health promotion process. Health Promotion is defined as:

“The process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve their health. To reach a complete state of physical, mental and social well-being an individual or group must be able to identify and realise aspirations, to satisfy needs and to change or cope with the environment”.

To work with communities through a regional leadership model to build capacity for preventive health on the Mid North Coast. 

1. Stimulate, support and evaluate community initiated preventive health innovations on the Mid North Coast.
2. Develop and leverage a regional leadership model for preventive health on the Mid North Coast

1. Collective and cooperative regional action and advocacy will build regional scale
2. Sharing of knowledge, skills and resources will achieve better outcomes
3. Principles of preventive health and integrated care will be at the core of what we do
4. Communities have a basic right to good health will be placed at the centre of our planning and delivery

The five health promotion principles of the Ottawa Charter includes:

1. Build healthy public policy – Health promotion goes beyond health care. It puts health on the agenda of policy makers in all sectors and at all levels, directing them to be aware of the health consequences of their decisions and to accept their responsibilities for health. Health promotion policy combines a range of approaches including legislation, fiscal measures, taxation and organisational change. The aim must be to make the healthier choice the easier choice for policy makers.
2. Create supportive environments – Our societies are complex and interrelated. Health cannot be separated from other goals. The overall guiding principle for the world, nations, regions and communities alike, is the need for people to take care of each other, our communities and our natural environment. Work and leisure should be a source of health for people. The way society organises work should help create a healthy society. Health promotion generates living and working conditions that are safe, stimulating, satisfying and enjoyable. Our environments need to make the healthier choice the easier choice.
3. Strengthen community actions – Health promotion works through concrete and effective community action in setting priorities, making decisions, planning strategies and implementing them to achieve better health. At the heart of this process is the empowerment of communities – their ownership and control of their own endeavours and destinies.
4. Develop personal skills – Health promotion supports personal and social development through providing information, education for health, and enhancing life skills. In turn this increases the options available to people to exercise more control over their own health and their environments, and to make healthier choices. Enabling people to learn, throughout life, to prepare themselves for all of its stages has to be facilitated in school, home, work and community settings. 
5. Reorient health services – The responsibility for health promotion in health services is shared among individuals, community groups, health professionals, health service institutions and Governments. They must work together towards a health care system which contributes to the pursuit of health. The role of the health sector must move increasingly in a health promotion direction, beyond its responsibility for providing clinical and curative services.