Practice Health Promotion Plan

Introduction
Although General Practices have been practicing health promotion for years, it is now generally agreed that by applying a more systematic approach to their health promotion and illness prevention strategies, general practice will influence population health outcomes.

The Royal Australian College of General Practices produced a guide in 1998 to assist GPs in their endeavours called "Putting Prevention into Practice: Guidelines for the implementation of prevention in the general practice setting." You will find this resource very helpful in highlighting areas that can be utilised for health promotion purposes. The Men's Health Promotion in General Practice project, a joint Innovations Pool project, funded by the Commonwealth Department of Health & Aged Care, between North East Valley, Northern and Melbourne Divisions of General Practice, have developed a strategic Health Promotion Plan. This plan can be used as a tool for General Practice Management Teams pursuing a health promoting practice. It is a practical tool to assist GPs and Management Teams apply the principles outlined in the RACGP's guidelines. You can download and customise to suit your practice.
View Word doc (88KB) of 5 page plan - View pdf of plan (237KB) - Download HPPlan2.zip

The Structure
The Health Promotion Plan is structured so that the "organisational level" section details the overarching/umbrella concepts. Individual action areas are then described in more specific detail. Although this example only shows one fully completed Action area - which is Men's health, you can include however many "action areas" you like eg., adolescent health, women's health, diabetes etc- now that you have this template!

The "Outcomes" column shows what you would expect to be happening on successful implementation of this plan (ie., your goals). The "Action Required" column shows what the main activities are that need to be undertaken to achieve the outcome. This will vary obviously from practice to practice but the idea it to outline specific actions. A planning tool has also been included for your use at the end of the plan. The tool can assist when the "Action Required" column requires quite a few steps. These "Actions Required" can be broken down to action lists - to clear, small, attainable steps.

The "Help Available" column cross references the ideas or concepts to either the RACGP's Putting Prevention into Practice (the Greenbook) or the Men's Health Promotion in General Practice Resource kit.

The "Date to be completed by" column is to ensure everyone is clear on the timeline for the implementation of the plan. Obviously not everything can be implemented at once so some strategic planning will need to be done by the Management team to ensure everyone agrees on the priority and timing of each activity.

The "Person/s responsible for action" column is to ensure at least one person has responsibility for implementing the Action/s Required". It will also make it easier at the time of review to be able to have a designated person responsible for reporting on the progress for each individual activity.

Lastly, the "Completed" column is to record successful implementation. You may want to record the date of completion or just tick it as completed.