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Health Promotion Capacity Building
Capacity building is a priority issue within health promotion planning and refers to the development of sustainable skills, organisational structures, resources and commitment to health improvement in health and non-health agencies. Capacity building activities are integral to developing and improving the quality and effectiveness of health services.
WHV's Approach
Our capacity building activities are informed by the organisation's strategic priorities and focus around:
- Managing the state-wide clearinghouse of women's health information and
- State-wide policy, planning and service delivery that takes account of and is responsive to gender.
WHV puts the concept of capacity building into action by building our own organisational capacity and working with others to build their capacity. WHV undertakes internal, external, as well as both planned and opportunistic capacity building activities, many of which may overlap.
Internal capacity building
To build health promotion capacity internally our activities centre around organisational development, workforce development and resource allocation. Some examples of how this is achieved is by;
- utilising the expertise and experience of members of the WHV Council and staff,
- maintaining currency of staff position descriptions about capacity building responsibility and organisational commitment to resourcing these activities, and
- building on a 'leading practice' rating attained in our 2005 Quality Improvement Council accreditation in the areas of Knowledge Management and accepted good practice in our field.
Working with others to build their capacity
Working with others to build their capacity fits with our state-wide role as a health promotion agency. Capacity building may present and be undertaken as either a planned or opportunistic activity. Some examples include;
- Supporting the goal of attaining 'leading practice' rating against all mandatory Quality Improvement Council accreditation standards through formal benchmarking, industry recognition and making opportunities to share excellent practice for the benefit of the field
- Providing organisation development expertise in such areas as governance and taxation concession status. This is often the basis for building trust from which other collaboration flows.
- Providing training in utilising the WHV Clearinghouse to improve evidence based health policy, health service planning and delivery of health services to individuals;
- Combining with others in developing health promotion advocacy tools;
- Making WHV's 'standing' available to support the legitimacy of community initiatives;
- Building and improving partnerships between specialist women's health services and mainstream health services.
Planned capacity building
Some examples of WHVs planned capacity building activities are;
- Public forums
- Clearinghouse skills development
- Gender advocacy skills development
- Presentations at conferences
- Women's health advocacy such as advocacy for sexual and reproductive health services
- Information resource development such as health issues information packages or gender impact assessment papers.
Opportunistic capacity building
Opportunistic capacity building may be seen as an opportunity to progress a WHV strategic priority and/or may provide the basis for the development of trust between agencies working together on an issue sensitive to one or the other of them. Opportunistic capacity building activities can include;
- Development of briefing papers, submissions, representations and other documents on request.
- Positive resolution of areas of organisational risk such as taxation concession status and governance.
- Convening meetings of WHV's community of interest to provide briefings on organisational development
- Responding to requests for information from the clearinghouse resource centre
- Answering questions relating to WHV's strategic and clearinghouse knowledge
- Providing expert opinion
- Facilitating and/or participating in roundtable discussions and government forums
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