Sth Auckland Health Education Campaign hits target

5th February, 2009

MEDIA RELEASE

South Auckland Health Education Campaign hits target

Monitoring results released this month for the first stage of the Let’s Beat Diabetes Health Information Campaign show incredibly positive results for all of the diverse target groups.

Maaori, Pacific, South Asian, ‘At Risk’ and people from areas of high deprivation all attained recall results of approximately 80% and this was even across genders for the Diabetes campaign results.

Relevance for the Let’s Beat Diabetes messages was also particularly high for Maaori, South Asian, high deprivation and at risk groups.

The Let’s Beat Diabetes campaign which ran from October to December 2008 included advertising on billboards, bus shelters, local and ethnic papers, radio. It has also been supported by news releases, editorial and presence at community events, project launches, prime time news coverage.

According to Allan Wylie, Director of Social Research for Phoenix Research Ltd says that the campaign has elicited extremely good results and with recall response rates comparable to high profile televised campaigns such as Like Minds, Like Mine.

Results indicate that the campaign has been particularly successful in influencing all target groups to make behavioural changes towards healthy lifestyle choices.

Dr Wylie suggests that the formidable results will come about not only from the campaign itself but will have been strongly influenced by the ongoing action at community level and other related healthy eating and healthy action campaigns.

Unlike any previous campaign, these results show clearly that the community have made the connection between eating healthily and preventing Type 2 Diabetes. Responses show strong intentions to make positive behaviour change and these intentions for change are indicative for all the key target groups.

One of the aims of the campaign is to bring Type 2 Diabetes into everyday conversations so that community know about the condition, can make informed healthy choices to prevent/delay and/or manage Diabetes within their families and community and assist in spreading the message. Campaign results show good levels of discussion are being generated with up to 63% of people discussing the campaign advertising at least once after they had seen or heard it. This outcome is also comparable to high profile televised campaigns.

Overall the results reflect the greater community awareness of Type 2 Diabetes as a community problem and that good levels of intentions to change are matched with a very receptive climate for accepting and undertaken of change behaviours within all target and ‘at risk’ groups.

Let’s Beat Diabetes is a community partnership aimed at long term changes to prevent and/or delay the onset of diabetes, slow the disease's progression and increase the quality of life for people with diabetes. The Programme was launched in 2005. All Healthy Eating Healthy Action (HEHA) activity for Counties Manukau is undertaken through the Lets Beat Diabetes Programme.

The programme is an intersectoral programme with Manukau, Franklin and Papakura Councils, SPARC, Schools, Food Industry, Ministry of Social Development, Primary Care and many NGOs involved as key partners.

ENDS

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