COMMUNITY workers fear the health of residents in a central Victorian shire, already one of the unhealthiest regions in the state, will deteriorate after funding for a preventative health program ended last week.
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People living in the Central Goldfields Shire are more than one-and-a-half times more likely to die prematurely than the average Victorian.
They can also expect to live two years shorter than residents of nearby Mount Alexander Shire, the Shire of Campaspe and the City of Greater Bendigo where the median age at death is in line with the state average at 82.
A partial explanation lies in the latest statistics from The University of Adelaide’s Public Health Information Development Unit, which reveal a number of areas in which the Central Goldfields outranks any other council area in Victoria for high risk behaviour leading to negative health outcomes.
More than 28 per cent of residents are smokers, well above the state average of 18 per cent and the highest in the state.
More people than in any other part of the state also consume risky levels of alcohol.
Central Goldfields also tops the list for death rates for breast cancer, lung cancer and diabetes and is in fourth place for heart attacks and sixth for stroke.
These statistics paint a picture of exactly the sort of issues Healthy Together Victoria was designed to address.
The chronic illness prevention program was jointly funded by state and federal governments, but Commonwealth funds weren’t renewed in last year’s federal budget and the program’s preventative health manager for the Goldfields region Sharon Ruyg believes its achievements will be at risk without renewed funding.
The PHIDU statistics date from 2012 and Ms Ruyg says much has been achieved through Healthy Together Victoria in that time, but without funding the numbers could start tracking in the opposite direction.
She says the importance of preventative health measures is illustrated by the fact they are holistic and can be owned by the whole community.
“The beauty of prevention is that everyone in the community, whether you’re in a workplace or a school or an early childhood service or a sporting club, that sense of belonging and care in those places, that is prevention,” she said.
“That’s under threat at the moment because of politics, debates and slashing of health budgets to the point that prevention’s almost being wiped out.
“If we stop focusing on prevention we are absolutely under threat of going backwards to curb these wicked lifestyle related diseases.”
Adding insult to injury is what some groups funded under the Healthy Together Victoria program see as a lack of transparency from federal Health Minister Sussan Ley.
The Collaboration of Community-based Obesity Prevention Sites has been supporting health initiatives in the Central Goldfields, where more than two thirds of the population are overweight or obese, since 2011.
Since the federal budget however, CO-OPS Collaboration director Dr Penny Love says she’s been kept in the dark around the initiative’s future and last week was informed funding would be withdrawn with only four days notice.
“Our last day was the 30th of June which was Tuesday and we received written notification to that effect the previous Friday at quarter past five in the evening,” she said.
“We hadn’t got a definitive answer on how we’d be impacted by the talk of cuts, we’d been asking the department probably since January already but no one really knew what process was going to be applied.
“We were certainly in the dark about what the outcome was going to be in the end.”
Dr Love said she had met with Ms Ley to discuss the project after having met all benchmarks set by the health department but was still blindsided.
“The meeting with the minister went very well, we talked about the positive results that were emerging but clearly the decision went even higher than that in terms of what cuts needed to be made,” she said.
“The process is so unclear it’s hard to know who made the ultimate decision but we were certainly receiving very positive feedback and we certainly felt that we would at least be offered the same opportunities as the other NGOs for a six or 12 month extension, we really didn’t expect that it would just be doors closed on the 30th of June.”
Dr Love warned that unless funding was restored in the short term, many of the gains made by the program would potentially be lost.
“You can’t recreate eight years of that type of mechanism overnight,” she said.
“It would take a long time to establish and there would be a lot of gains that we’ve achieved that would be lost quite quickly, which is probably the saddest part of the announcement .”
Over and above a return to the situation as it stood in 2012, Dr Love said the loss of the Healthy Together Victoria funding could set public health initiatives back by up to a decade.
“I think there’s a chance practitioners will go back to what we were doing five, 10 years ago which is very much a programmatic approach,” she said.
“We’ve seen the results of that are not sustainable, you don’t get long term sustained behaviour change from doing that.”
A spokeswoman for the federal Health Department said funding had not been cut but the contract had been completed.
"The Collaboration of Community-based Obesity Prevention Sites had a three year contract that ended on 30 June this year," she said.
"CO-OPS will have an opportunity to seek funding through a competitive process under the health flexible funds in 2015/16."
The spokeswoman said the organisation was informed of the decision via email on June 17.
“The Australian government is investing $100 million in the Sporting Schools initiative to encourage students into sport-based physical activity and to help them develop good habits that underpin lifelong physical fitness,” she said.
“The government also continues to push the "Health Star Rating" system to help consumers easily choose healthier food.”