ARARAT Rural City and East Grampians Health Service, together with other community partners, are implementing the Ararat Rural City Municipal Health and Wellbeing Plan to target childhood obesity reduction through obesity education, advice and promoting exercise among other interventions.
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Because of this, results in the Victoria Population Health Survey indicates a reduction in obesity of 0.3 per cent. The statewide trend for the same period has seen obesity increase 1.3 per cent.
This is a credit to Ararat to openly discuss and address the obesity issue but the work needs to continue.
The lifestyle related illnesses would be reduced with four actions - stop smoking; reduce drinking dangerous levels of alcohol; healthy eating; more exercise.
The federal government’s approach to lead the cessation of smoking has worked very well. Ararat though, has higher levels of smoking than the state levels.
Alcohol consumption and particularly excessive consumption, needs to be addressed and the dangerous levels reduced. It is well documented that family violence, community violence and chronic disease will be reduced if excessive alcohol consumption is reduced.
Research from the University of Queensland’s Garry Chan highlights the rate of alcohol misuse and harm caused is disproportionately higher in rural areas than in urban areas. Some of the research showed that in fact, parental supply increases the risk of problem drinking in adolescent children.
By supplying alcohol to their adolescent children, parents appear to facilitate a more rapid progression towards unsupervised alcohol use – it went on to say parental supply of alcohol should be a key focus for prevention in rural areas.
To narrow the gap in alcohol misuse between rural and urban Australia, a parent focused community based, prevention approach is required.
This approach should identify risk factors and utilise local resources to increase parent’s awareness of the harmful effects of adolescent drinking and the role of parents in preventing alcohol related harm among adolescents.
These would be steps towards reducing alcohol misuse in rural Australia.
- Nick Bush is Ararat Rural City and East Grampians Health Service chief executive officer