The Health Promotion Program covers the following areas: Chronic diseases, Breast Cancer/BreastScreen, PapScreen, Diabetes, Nutrition, Men's Health, Women's Health, and Health Promotion training.

Health promotion is defined as the process of "enabling people to increase control over and improve their health and wellbeing in order that they can attain and maintain the best possible quality of life." Staff at MDHSS recognise the importance of health promotion and adopt this definition for all services they offer. Five key action areas of health promotion, which help guide MDHSS and support the community are:

• Developing Personal Skills
• Creating Supportive Environments
• Building Healthy Public Policy
• Strengthening Community Action
• Reorienting Health Services towards Primary Care

MDHSS has developed a Health Promotion Plan to ensure that the program is efficient and effective and integrated with other local and external service providers. In order to develop the Health Promotion Plan, staff gained information from government bodies, research information, and from the community, and via the MDHSS Five-year Plan developed by Clearview Consulting Group. The aim of the Health Promotion Plan is to promote positive wellbeing, reduce preventable illness and lower overall health care expenditure.

Health Promotion activities including information and education sessions provided to the community so far include but are not limited to:

• Blood Pressure Screening
• Blood Glucose Monitoring
• BreastScreen
• Hearing Tests and information on hearing loss
• Sexual and Reproductive Health Consultations
• Health Expo at Mallacoota P-12 College
• Diabetes Education Lifestyle Day
• Blood Glucose Machine Testing
• Polio Information
• Arthritis Information
• Motor Neurone Disease Awareness
• "Four steps for life" CPR
• Nutrition and Hydration workshop at Mallacoota P-12 College
• Puberty Information for Parents at P-12 College
• Mallacoota Ambulance Information

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