Award for homegrown preventive health effort

BENDIGO Health have picked up a prize at the 2022 Victorian Health Promotion Awards for their program to integrate preventative health advice into routine hospital visits.

The program called Bendigo Health – Making every consultation count, picked up the Leading Health Promotion Research Award.

Project officer of the Health Promotion Team, Stephen Barrett, was the driving force behind the program and said it was important to encourage a healthy lifestyle for patients.

“Patients come to the hospital for their routine care and to see their doctors,” he said.

“What we then try to do is use that visit as an opportunity to get the patient thinking about doing some more exercise. Then we research the use of telephone coaching to facilitate that.”

Mr Barrett said the program had proven both effective and low-cost.

“Our results have shown that if we can get patients into these programs from their hospital visits that they can go on to improve their physical activity and reduce their weight and BMI,” he said.

“This then improves their quality of life. It’s a cost-effective way to gain these health outcomes as well.”

The next step, Mr Barrett said, was to keep growing the program and expand further across the wider region in the future.

“We have done it at Bendigo Health now for a couple of years and shown that it is an effective research method,” he said.

“What we would like to do is see if we could trial it on a bigger scale, look at partnering with other health services, possibly around the Loddon Mallee region.

“If they could highlight patients that might be a fit for the program, refer them to the program we could then see if we could bring these health benefits to a broader region.”