preventative policies – Public Health Expert, University of Otago, New Zealand

The smokefree policies of political parties: Do they care about people who smoke?

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020 | Nick Wilson | 2 Comments

George Thomson*, Nick Wilson, Janet Hoek, Andrew Waa, Richard Edwards

In this time of Covid-19, helping people who smoke to quit their addiction has an even greater importance. Smokers are more vulnerable to many harmful health effects, including severe effects from the virus. Policies that support people who smoke to be smokefree would also increase the discretionary income of many of those most affected by the Covid-driven recession. We looked at the policies of seven New Zealand political parties and found that they are largely ignoring the strategies that would help smokers to become free of their nicotine addiction.

Continue reading →

Nine Things New Zealand Must Do To Tackle The Child Obesity Crisis

Monday, July 24th, 2017 | dayhi34p | No Comments

Dr Stefanie Vandevijvere, Professor Boyd Swinburn

A panel of 71 independent and government experts have undertaken an evaluation of New Zealand Government food environment policies, compared to international best practice. This is the second such evaluation, the first being in 2014. In this blog we summarise the findings. There are some areas where New Zealand is at the level of best practice and there are some areas where there is progress compared to 2014. However, there remain major implementation gaps, especially for policies to improve the healthiness of food environments, to catch up with other nations globally in tackling the child obesity crisis.

Continue reading →

If you are having trouble seeing a green 'Post comment' button when you are trying to submit a comment, please check to see if you are using Internet Explorer. If so, follow these instructions:

1. Open the browser
2. Press the Alt key on your keyboard and this will make a menu bar at the top appear
3. Click on tools and then select compatibility view settings
4. Remove all ticks from the 3 boxes

This removes the compatibility setting on your browser and should allow you to see the button.

· Peer review process: Where a blog post has a single author, then the content is always peer-reviewed by at least one senior academic in public health. This is to help ensure that statements have a reasonable basis in terms of scientific plausibility and to ensure that uncertainty is appropriately acknowledged where statements have speculative aspects. For multi-authored blogs there can also be additional peer-review. Of note is that the PHE blog posts are often well-referenced so that readers can readily check the background science and arguments.

· Competing interests: Where a blog post author has a commercial competing interest then this will be acknowledged in a statement at the end of the blog post.

· Relationship with the parent institution: Any views expressed in these blog posts are those of the author(s) alone and not their parent institution. This is consistent with the meaning of academic freedom under the NZ Education Act 1989 (section 161). Furthermore, in a free society, it is undesirable for universities to vet or otherwise control statements by academic staff.

· Comments posted to this blog: These will usually only be included if they add intellectual content to the discussions and are not abusive etc.

Any views or opinion represented in this site belong solely to the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the University of Otago. Any view or opinion represented in the comments are personal and are those of the respective commentator/contributor to this site.

Public Health Expert

Recent Posts

Archives

Tag Archives: preventative policies

The smokefree policies of political parties: Do they care about people who smoke?

Nine Things New Zealand Must Do To Tackle The Child Obesity Crisis

Having trouble posting comments?

Notes about PHE blog: