In May 2023, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Sport adopted an inquiry into Diabetes, following a referral from the Minister for Health and Aged Care, the Hon Mark Butler MP.
The inquiry website can be accessed here. Written submissions were invited by 31 August 2023.
AHPA provided a written response to the Inquiry and called on the government to:
- Bolster the diabetes prevention system with a sustained investment in a health promotion workforce to focus on health equity and the broad determinants of health to address obesity and diabetes in Australia.
- Invest in high-quality applied, health promotion and illness prevention research and ensure review funding rounds are considerate of the complexities of real-world, community-based prevention research.
- Implement policies, programs and strategies that demonstrate utility at scale and tailor approaches to local contexts. These tailored approaches should be co-designed with community members and people with lived experience to ensure that they are guided by community from whom the programs, policies and systems represent.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of current government policies and programs and integrate evidence-based approaches into policy and practice.
The submission was prepared by Associate Professor Freya MacMillian and Dr. Dimitri Batras, AHPA Directors, and AHPA members Catherine Nguyen, Justin Edom, and Ambika Aul.
Read the submission in full here.