As the interest in Health in All Policies approaches grows around the world,
it's becoming increasingly important to provide those implementing such approaches
with the skills that are necessary to do so.
That of course means training not only people in the health department,
but also people in other departments,
and possibly even people outside of Government,
so that Health in All Policies approaches can be implemented jointly.
Therefore, ideally such training and skills building should also be done together,
so that if you bring different sectors, different portfolios, different departments,
into a room for a certain period of time
and help them understand each other and speak their language,
then this can truly help them implement Health in All Policy in real life.
The World Health Organisation has been supporting Health in All Policies for a number of years now,
and only last year also held a big conference on Health in All Policies in Helsinki, Finland.
In the context of that work, it has also been developing training materials
and it has used the experience of South Australia
to pilot such training and the result has been a training manual that has been produced here in South Australia
together with the World Health Organisation.
Building on that experience, the WHO has also decided
that it would be helpful to have a training manual for trainers,
because it is so important that those training for Health in All Policy approaches
really do that within the context of the country or the Government in which the people they are training work.
To successfully apply Health in All Policy approaches actually needs a range of skills
that are usually not taught in the normal process of education,
definitely they're rarely taught in schools of public health.
First and foremost are skills in negotiation;
How do you really communicate with other sectors and other disciplines?
How do you negotiate for mutual gain?
Because Health in All Policies is first and foremost about creating synergies between policy areas,
so the issue is not to press health upon others,
but actually to work jointly on an approach that benefits society as a whole.
So these skills in negotiation, communication, listening,
analysing an environment, understanding the policy priorities of others,
are absolutely critical, and also skills to be able to identify who one should work with.
Do a stakeholder analysis,
and be able to understand the system in which such negotiations need to take place.
South Australia has made quite significant progress in mainstreaming the Health in All Policies approach,
I think it has worked in a number of very important phases,
because the first phase really laid the ground in terms of communicating with many different sectors,
for example through the Health Lens Analysis,
but also through having direct contact with the centre of Government
through the work with the Department of Premier and Cabinet.
So the mainstreaming also went up in a way to the whole of Government and to the executives
of other departments, and came down, in quotes, to the people working in the departments themselves.
That, I believe, laid a lot of the ground to be able to move to the next step, and that is
basically codifying the Health in All Policies approach through South Australia's new Public Health Act,
which clearly states that Health in All Policies is part of the remit and responsibility of the Minister of Health,
but also indicates that at the local level, there are responsibilities to implement Health in All Policies
through the local authorities and municipalities,
so that is clearly a way to mainstream the Health in All Policies approach,
but beyond that, there have been other means to do that
if you go to a whole range of important documents from the Department of Health for example;
the public health report, the public health strategy,
they all include Health in All Policies,
and of course, many projects, initiatives and programs throughout the state,
for example the OPAL program that fights obesity,
is also based on that cross sectoral thinking, and Health in All Policies,
so a fair bit of mainstreaming has been going on already,
and the important thing now is to explore in what way new steps can be taken,
so that really a range of other departments, be it economics, be it mothers and children,
be it the environment, really very systematically make use of this approach.