Key achievements within the public health sector

The following represents some of the recent key achievements of the public health sector in Australia.

• Increasing community awareness and behaviour change in relation to risk factors for tobacco related and skin cancers
• Reduction of the transmission of communicable diseases specifically HIV/AIDS;
• Early detection of breast and cervical cancers
• Reduction in the rates of mortality of motor vehicle crashes
• Providing communities with access to public health information including the development of innovative techniques in social marketing of public health policy
• Focus on evidence based practice (e.g. Cochrane Collaborating Centres)
• Developing communicable disease control (vaccine preventable diseases and food-borne diseases)
• Antivenom research
• Improved approach to the use of data by the application of epidemiological principles to statistical analysis (e.g. injury surveillance)
• Medical entomology