By Jane Garcia

Anyone working in the area of public health in Victoria over the past decade will have come across the passionate thought leader Rob Moodie.

After leading the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth) as chief executive officer since 1998, he has resigned to take up the newly established position as Chair in Global Health at Melbourne University’s Nossal Institute.
Victorian Health Minister, Bronwyn Pike said in a statement that the enormous amount of change and success experienced by VicHealth could be directly attributed to Rob Moodie’s leadership and vision for health promotion.

“Under Rob’s direction VicHealth has broken new ground in highlighting the influence of social, political and economic issues underlying health problems and strategies to address them”, she said.

The Victorian Government established VicHealth to use a small percentage of a dedicated tobacco levy to promote health, particularly through partnerships with cultural, recreational and other local community groups, and fund innovative public health research. Dr Moodie is proud of several significant achievements in his nearly 10 years at the foundation.

He was involved in introducing a new approach to mental health promotion, including strategies looking at how to promote good mental health. “Up until now it’s really been a discussion around treatment and perhaps early intervention, but nobody’s been thinking about what are the causes of poor mental health and what should we be doing about it?”

Another area he found “very satisfying” was the foundation’s funding of programs and initiatives through Quit Victoria and the Cancer Council to reduce the rate of tobacco smoking.

Dr Moodie says VicHealth has also become an organisation better using evidence and data to develop innovative ideas and approaches to public health concerns.

“We’ve changed from a funding organisation to an organisation that tries to create better relationships with the people that we fund; we’re trying to use evidence a lot more in what we do and how we direct people; and we’ve been pretty keen on the issue of public discussion advocacy around important health issues,” he says.
While proud of his achievements, Dr Moodie is quite comfortable with moving on, saying, “Places like VicHealth need new leadership and to be reinvented regularly. I think it’s good for the organisation and I’m ready to move on to a new challenge too.”

A weighty issue

He says one of the biggest changes he’s seen in health has been the rise in the community’s weight, including the number of obese individuals.

“It is a complex area where we think we have an important contribution to make,” Dr Moodie says.
“If you look at the last 30 years, we see this issue of the capacity to manufacture high-density food and drink and promote it to enormous amounts, as well as the decline in physical activity and the huge increase in forms of inactive entertainment – videos, computers, electronic games – and the rise of our dependence on cars.
“The ‘conspiracy of sedentariness’ all happened at the same time.
“Often when governments try to do something about this particular issue, especially if they want to regulate, they’re called ‘nanny states’ or are accused of social engineering. Well, a whole lot of social engineering has occurred by virtue of advertising. Obesity is fundamentally a commercial success.”

This conflux of factors leading to what has been described as an obesity epidemic even caught health professionals by surprise, according to Dr Moodie.

“When I first came on it was one of the first things pointed out to me by someone at Monash University that this was the first generation of sedentary kids,” he says.
“It really worried us. That’s why we’ve really focussed on the issue of the walking bus and trying to get kids walking and active again.
“One of the reasons it did catch everyone unawares was because there wasn’t any good surveillance. In terms of weight or activity or nutrition, these surveillance studies were being done every 10 to 15 years as opposed to say every year as we do with tobacco use or other areas.”

Looking forward

He nominates some of the most important health promotion challenges as including mental health, family violence issues, harassment and bullying, discrimination and social exclusion, and the ‘social drugs’ of tobacco and alcohol use.

“Tobacco is still a huge issue. There is sometimes the sense that we’ve beaten it, because there has been some pretty profound change, but we haven’t,” Dr Moodie says.
“It is still the major or the second-most important cause of preventable death and it’s probably the best buy in terms of improving people’s health.”

He believes the potential impact of climate change on human health is an emerging area on the health radar in Australia.

“We’ve been working with ICLEI to develop a joint tool looking at the economic case for walking – decreases in CO2 emissions and in fuel and maintenance costs of cars; decreases the risk of cardiovascular disease; decreased traffic congestion; and all those sorts of things,” Dr Moodie says.
“We’re very keen to look at the real overlap between the areas we’re interested in – which are physical activity, nutrition, mental health and even tobacco, for example – with ecological issues. If we can reduce car use and increase cycling and walking, then that really helps the ecology.
“We’ve done a lot of work with the Planning Institute of Australia on getting urban planners involved because you can plan health into your local environment or you can basically plan it out.”

He takes up the position as Chair in Global Health next month (April 2007) and is looking forward to working on health promotion initiatives in developing countries, especially in preventing infection with HIV and related diseases.

“I started working in Africa in refugee camps eight years ago and I’ve always been keen to get back and work on the ground again,” Dr Moodie says.
“I hope to be working in Mozambique and I’m doing some work in India as well on a Bill and Melinda Gates-funded program, one of the biggest HIV-prevention programs in the world. I have a big interest in HIV, it’s an areas I used to work a lot in before I came to VicHealth. My experience in tobacco control and some of these other areas means I’d be very keen in getting involved in teaching and developing local skills and capacity in local health in places like Mozambique and other parts of Africa.”

The current Quit Victoria chief executive officer, Todd Harper, will become the new CEO of VicHealth.

For more on VicHealth see www.vichealth.vic.gov.au

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