AUSTRALIAN SELF-CARE ALLIANCE

Healthier self-care for everyone, everywhere

The Australian Self-Care Alliance is a collaboration between healthcare consumers, health promotion charities, policy experts and industry partners that promotes the adoption of self-care and its implementation as a core element of all aspects of physical and mental health services and policies for Australia.

Self-care describes the role of individuals in preventing disease, managing their mental and physical health, and actively participating in their health care.

The Vision

Self-care for health: a national policy blueprint provides a framework for action to achieve integration of self-care across Australia’s health system. It identifies outcome measures that will indicate progress and proposes seven guiding principles, three strategic priorities and twelve ‘action areas’ for policy development related to self-care.

Policy Priorities

National Health Literacy Strategy

Develop a national health literacy strategy aimed at improving health literacy and self-care capability for all.

Self-care Core Competencies

Invest in the development of cross-disciplinary self-care core competencies for all relevant health professionals and other care workers, engaging with consumer representative organisations, healthcare providers, health workforce peak bodies and professional colleges in a collaborative process.

National Health & Consumer Engagement Framework

Invest in the development & implementation of a comprehensive national health and consumer engagement framework.

Digital Health Information & Resource Library

Establish a national digital health information and resource library and national quality assurance framework to assess the quality and credibility of web-based health resources and mobile health apps.

Self-care Support Assessment Tools

Develop and implement validated self-care and self-care support assessment tools, evaluation measures and reporting mechanisms.

Funding & Service Models

Implement funding and service models that enable and support self-care.

Innovation & Development Fund

Establish a long-term preventative health and self-care innovation and development fund.

National Self-Care Service (NSCS)

Establish a National Self-Care Service (NSCS) to provide national leadership and influence system change to embed self-care in health practice and services and to engage, inform and resource individuals, families, and communities in practising self-care for better health.

"Health in all policies" Approach

All levels of Australian governments should establish ‘health in all policies’ approaches that emphasise the prevention of disease and support individual and community capacity for engagement in self-care to improve population health.