Municipal Public Health Planning in Queensland: achievements, barriers and implementation success factors

Creating healthier and more sustainable cities requires new approaches to planning at the local level. Queensland Health, Local Governments and Griffith University have formed a working partnership to implement Municipal Public Health Planning (MPHP) in local government. Each city has its own culture and diversity, its own political and organisational barriers to planning, and changing health professional capacity. The Queensland Healthy City and Shires Network facilitates partnerships, research, training and learning environments with local government and community agencies that are developing and implementing participatory planning. Healthy cities and shires meet and compare their planning achievements. Regional and town planning schemes provide consistency for major infrastructure and land development, and local government legislation now requires cities to determine social health needs. MPHP is identified as one of several community public health planning models trialed in this research. A practical ‘seven step’ MPHP process provides the framework for healthy cites needs based planning. This paper discusses the importance of a ‘platform approach’, where government and non-government agencies and community groups form a network and engage in the business of sustainable strategic health planning. The platform approach has 3 dimensions, Governance (long-term vision, layers of planning, industry support and regulation); a Platform (mechanism for agency networking, stakeholder forum, advisory committee, terms of reference, project management); and Implementation (local strategies and priority action areas, desired outcomes, communication process and evaluation). The research findings highlight the importance of the ‘platform approach’. An Implementation Model has been developed to promote the actioning of strategies in community planning. In the model health strategies ‘link up’ vertically to higher levels of planning, and ‘link across’ horizontally to address gaps in agency planning, community group concerns and resident needs. The paper will describe the research developed in evaluation of MPHP, including a summary of the qualitative evaluation methodology, results and findings of the study and a ‘Platform Approach’ to participatory planning and MPHP Implementation Model.