COVID-19
In The Field
Spotlight on self-care: a game changer for the health of everyone
Freya Lucas
Jul 24, 2020
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A new paper (to be made publicly available shortly) from the Mitchell Institute calls for the lessons from the COVID-19 experience to encourage all Australians to make self-care a central component of their lives – for the sake of everyone’s health.
The release of the paper coincides with International Self-Care Day, a global campaign for recognition of self-care as essential for good health for individuals and populations.Self-care and health: by all, for all. Learning from COVID-19, highlights the effectiveness of self-care in improving health and wellbeing for individuals and communities, and may be of use to those in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector as those educators in New South Wales and Victoria deal with secondary rounds of COVID-19.
“We have had strong national and local leadership throughout the COVID-19 experience that has been focused on getting each one of us to help keep ourselves safe from infection, and to help others by doing so,” Professor of Health Policy, Rosemary Calder said.
“We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to apply this lesson to develop our health system to help people to be healthier, rather than waiting for them to be unwell with health problems that are preventable – which is what happens now.”
Individual self-care is dependent on a range of factors including health knowledge, health literacy and socioeconomic factors such as casual employment and financial stresses.
“We know that preventable chronic disease and high rates of risks for poor health disproportionately affect individuals and communities that are socio-economically disadvantaged.”
The report recommends that governments focus on enabling the health system to embed self-care support in all health care services and to prioritise prevention and management of both infectious and chronic diseases, particularly in primary health care.
“Self-care by all, for all, needs to become usual behaviour and practice in community life, with the same strong leadership from governments and health experts that has been so effective through the pandemic. This approach will not only help improve the health of individuals, it will build our ability to protect ourselves against infectious diseases like COVID-19.”
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