East Gippsland locations including the Lakes Entrance footbridge, Lake Tyers Beach and the Nowa Nowa trestle bridge feature in a new video celebrating community health.
Released by the Alliance of Rural and Regional Community Health, the film highlights the way community health supports families, individuals and communities at every stage of life.
We appear alongside other community health organisations from across rural and regional Victoria, showcasing care that is grounded in local communities and driven by local need.
Launched at the ARRCH Conference in Ballarat, the film was produced to increase the visibility and understanding of community health organisations across Victoria.
The film includes our Chief Executive Officer Anne-Maree Kaser and former board member Robyn Cooney, reinforcing the message: “We choose community health.”
Robyn said she was proud to be involved in celebrating the role community health plays in people’s lives.
“Community health provides health without walls,” she said. “It’s really important that we rely on people and services, rather than buildings, to deliver healthcare. In the end, health is about wellbeing.”
The videographer travelled 4000 kilometres as part of the shoot, distilling four hours of filming into a four-minute final cut. Along the way, the production encountered a few unexpected challenges, including a drone attracting the attention of both a hawk and a pelican, and one participant sustaining a bite from an overly curious rosella.
Thankfully, no such incidents occurred during the East Gippsland shoot, and the initial screening of the video prompted a strong response from conference delegates.
At the ARRCH Conference, Anne-Maree hosted a panel discussion focused on the future readiness of community health and its growing role in preventative care.
“We are incredibly fortunate in Victoria to have a registered independent community health system, the only jurisdiction in Australia to have retained this model,” she said.
“It’s important to listen to the experts and the experts are people, community and the organisations who service those communities.”
Several of our staff also presented at the conference, including research and program evaluation officer Jannine Bailey, who spoke about our Consumer Voice Framework, and health promotion officer Renate Hall, who shared insights from the Let’s Veg Up! campaign, currently running in Ritchies IGA supermarkets in Paynesville and Eastwood.
The ARRCH video was shot by Mark Simmonds from Ballarat Community Health.