‘Your Health is in Your Hands’ is a national project to raise awareness and boost the rates of MBS 715 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health checks among the patient and health practitioner communities. The project is aimed at increasing awareness and understanding of the benefit of health checks to lead to behaviour change, and overall, better health outcomes for our community.
We created a positive, empowering campaign approach that engages patients about the personal health benefits, while ensuring health practitioners are informed about the importance of culturally safe care. This was informed by research and concept testing with key target audiences.
‘Your Health is in Your Hands’ materials are highly visual and engaging, utilising Luke Penrith’s artwork, ‘Let’s Walk and Talk Out Bush’ telling the cultural importance of good health and wellbeing.
Our work on the campaign included the production of patient and health professional brochures, a community poster, a patient journey graphic for health workers, an animation informing people about the health check, a two part podcast featuring Dr Ngaire Brown and video case study stories and social media assets.
Real stories were featured in video case studies highlighting the success and dedication of Aboriginal health services in delivering the 715 health check, reducing barriers to getting or undertaking a health check, by sharing real experiences.
For implementation, we developed a stakeholder distribution strategy with targeted engagement and follow up with remote, regional and urban health providers and communities. Focused engagement on social media and through digital editorial is also used to continue momentum throughout the strategy implementation, including generating user contribution and content to engage target groups.
We thank the communities and stakeholders that collaborated with us to refine these materials; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous health practitioners, including Royal College of General Practitioners and National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation.