The recommendations of the HealthyLaws jury featured in a recent Croakey article (March 21st) by SA PHAA President, Kate Kameniar. The article set out to provide “A public health briefing for the new Health Minister” following the Liberal Party win in the recent state elections. kate highlighted the recommendations as follows:

“Recommendations from a South Australian Citizen’s jury could be readily implemented; support councils to implement their public health plans around healthy food access, make health a consideration for new planning applications such as zoning to prevent new unhealthy food outlets close to schools, and audit and enforce existing nutritional guidelines in food outlets in public institutions including schools and hospitals. Further commitments include measuring and reporting on health and wellbeing, evaluating the success of primary health prevention campaigns, funding research that reflects community need and reporting to Parliament each year on preventive health activity.

As Kate noted these are: “All valuable strategies, however as yet, no funding commitment has been identified.” She called for: “an additional 10 per cent of the total funding for public health initiative be allocated to proper evaluation.”

We also recently came across a previous Croakey blog by Melissa Smart from the 2015 Population Health Congress in which we presented the findings from the HealthyViews forum. You can find it here (scroll down the page to find HealthyViews):