Background
Preconception care (PCC) is an important preventive strategy for improving maternal and child health, yet its routine provision in primary care remains inconsistent, particularly for populations experiencing inequities. This study explored primary care providers’ perspectives on barriers and enablers influencing PCC provision for African migrant and refugee women in Victoria, Australia.
Methods
Eleven primary care providers, including four general practitioners, four practice or refugee health nurses, and three maternal and child health nurses, participated in semi-structured interviews between August 2024 and March 2025. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, de-identified, and analysed using a hybrid deductive-inductive thematic approach guided by the Theoretical Domains Framework, with subthemes mapped to the Capability, Opportunity, Motivation-Behaviour model.
Results
Providers viewed PCC as important, but reported that its provision was inconsistent and usually embedded within routine consultations rather than delivered as a distinct service. Enablers included preventive orientation, clinical and communication skills, teamwork, continuity of care, trusted relationships, and staged use of routine visits to introduce PCC over time. Barriers included limited consultation time, funding and clinic resources, gaps in PCC training, inconsistent interpreter access, and broader social and structural factors affecting women’s engagement with PCC. Providers’ accounts suggested that motivation to provide PCC was generally strong, but capability and opportunity constraints limited consistent practice.
Conclusions
Improving equitable PCC provision for African migrant and refugee women requires strategies that strengthen provider capability and address organisational, relational, and system-level conditions supporting routine, culturally responsive PCC in primary care.

This presentation introduces how public health higher education can invest in the next generation of public health leaders by positioning Students as partners in inclusive, accessible and culturally safe learning environments. Drawing on two of Deakin University’s Students as Partners initiatives, Students Mentoring Staff and Coffee Conversations, we will explore how structured mentoring and informal dialogue reconfigures traditional hierarchies to strengthen professional growth and staff practice in public health teaching and learning.

Student Mentoring Staff invites students to mentor academics by sharing lived experience of disability, diversity and learning as a legitimate and necessary form of expertise. Throughout the teaching period, student and staff partners meet 1:1 in guided conversations that support reflection, shared understanding and collaborative problem solving. Students are remunerated, modelling that equitable participation requires recognition, resourcing and genuine intent.

This work is complemented by Coffee Conversations, where staff meet with small groups of students after class. Rather than waiting for end-of-unit feedback, Coffee Conversations implements a weekly feedback loop enabling responsive changes to the unit. Over a warm cup of coffee, it’s a low pressure, dialogic moment to unpack feedback into pedagogy, unit design and decision making, strengthening trust, curiosity and mutual respect.

Staff describe these partnership experiences as transformative, observing changes in how they approach curriculum design, communication practices and relationship-building in classrooms. Students have reported feeling valued and able to influence meaningful change, rather than being consulted symbolically.

Together, these practices strengthen public health education by cultivating the capabilities graduates need for tackling contemporary health challenges. The mentoring model supports the development of health practitioners who listen with care, engage with lived experience, navigate complexity with empathy and create environments where individuals feel safe to speak. These relational capabilities equip graduates to enter the public health workforce with integrity and a strong commitment to equity.

Systems, Solidarity and Self-Reflection: Organisational Transformation for Health Equity

The pursuit of health equity requires more than externally focused programs and policy reform; it demands that public health organisations critically examine the internal conditions that shape how equity is understood, practiced, and enacted. Research consistently demonstrates that sustainable systems change depends on alignment between organisational practice and community aspirations. Yet public health institutions are often treated as neutral actors rather than as social systems embedded within broader histories of colonialism, exclusion, and inequitable power relations.

This presentation explores the journey that VicHealth has embarked on to align its internal organisational conditions with its vision for a healthier and fairer Victoria through the development of a VicHealth Equity Ecosystem. Framed by systems thinking and an intersectional approach to health equity, the Equity Ecosystem model conceptualises equity practice as an interconnected and continuous process rather than a linear initiative with a fixed endpoint. VicHealth’s approach prioritises the examination of policies, processes, cultures, and practices that shape both internal operations and external impact. This includes recruitment and employment practices, organisational culture and behaviour, grant-making, research commissioning, partnership development, and community engagement.

Central to this work is the recognition that public health organisations must themselves become sites of social change towards equity and justice. This presentation posits that strengthening the future public health workforce requires more than technical capability; it requires organisations to cultivate humility, curiosity, accountability, and shared decision-making with communities experiencing structural exclusion, including meaningful engagement with First Peoples self-determination, treaty, and truth-telling processes. Transforming healthier futures requires not only systems reform, but transformation within the institutions seeking to lead it.

Menopause is a significant public health issue yet is often positioned predominantly as a biomedical problem defined by symptoms, deficit, and decline. Such narrow framings obscure the social, cultural, and economic forces that shape how women understand and live through this transition and limit the field’s capacity to develop approaches grounded in equity, diversity, inclusion, and resilience. This study explored how Australian cisgender women aged 45-65 interpreted menopause within the broader landscape of midlife pressures and expectations.
A qualitative survey was completed by 362 women, generating wide-ranging accounts across diverse locations, work arrangements, caregiving roles, and economic circumstances. Using a social constructionist approach, data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Four themes captured the breadth of women’s experiences: disruption and destabilisation; intensifying demands of productivity; moments of ease, acceptance, and positive midlife re-orientation; and the emergence of freedom, resilience, and personal strength.
Across the data, menopause was interpreted as an experience shaped by expectations, environments, relationships, and workplaces in women’s everyday lives. For many participants, symptoms intersected with inflexible workplaces, unequal domestic labour, and limited healthcare support, intensifying existing inequities and affecting their sense of competence. For others, menopause was less disruptive than expected, or opened space to re-evaluate priorities, redistribute responsibilities, and cultivate new forms of resilience and confidence.
These findings demonstrate that menopause is shaped by the structural and relational contexts of women’s lives, including intersecting forces of gender, labour, and expectations. Recognising the diversity of women’s accounts, and the inequities that contour them, is essential for developing inclusive public health approaches that move beyond biomedical narratives. Attending to the supports and barriers shaped by gendered, economic, and cultural contexts is critical for promoting equitable experiences of menopause across diverse communities and for guiding public health approaches that address the structural determinants shaping women’s wellbeing in midlife.

Background:
Substance use and dependence and associated harms among women in prison is a common and growing issue. These harms are compounded by intersecting inequities of high prevalence of homelessness, mental illness, and experiences of violence and trauma. Failure to implement comprehensive, culturally appropriate, and uninterrupted alcohol and other drug (AOD) care during and following imprisonment contributes to an elevated risk of AOD-related harms and reinforces cycles of disadvantage and health inequity. Despite evidence that continuity of AOD care improves post-release outcomes, available support pathways are complex, fragmented, and difficult to navigate.

Aim:
To understand the types of available services, referral pathways, service integration, and system-level challenges in transitional healthcare services available to women leaving prison in Victoria who have AOD support needs.

Methods:
A two-phase service mapping approach will be undertaken. Phase 1 involves a comprehensive desktop review of publicly available sources, including service directories, policy documents, government frameworks, and program evaluations. Phase 2 comprises key informant interviews with service providers and government to verify and clarify information, fill gaps, and provide additional insights into structural and operational systems. Data will be synthesised into a visual service map and qualitative data will be thematically analysed.

Results and implications:
Preliminary findings indicate that AOD-specific transitional care pathways are not clearly defined. While general transitional support programs exist, eligibility criteria are complex and there is limited transparency of assessment processes and service scope. Program evaluations are limited. Phase 2 will build on these findings to generate a comprehensive overview of the current service landscape. By providing an integrated overview of the system and its barriers and enablers, this work will inform the development of targeted strategies to strengthen transitional healthcare and improve health and social outcomes for women in Victoria during the high-risk transition period from prison to the community.

Background: Co‑design is a common strategy to address health inequities by embedding lived experience, inclusion, and shared decision‑making within public health intervention development. However, the evidence on how co‑design is conceptualised, operationalised, and evaluated when engaging young people aged 18-25, particularly those from priority populations, remains fragmented and inconsistent. Aim/Objectives: This umbrella review synthesises contemporary review‑level evidence on co‑design approaches used to engage young people in public health contexts. It examines how equity, power‑sharing, and participation are conceptualised and operationalised, including the extent the needs of priority populations are explicitly addressed. Methods: An umbrella review was conducted in accordance with PRISMA 2020 guidelines, limited to literature published in the past ten years. Systematic searches of five electronic databases identified six review-level studies examining co-design or participatory approaches involving young people in public health intervention development. Definitions of co-design, frameworks and participation models, depth of youth involvement, and the extent to which equity-oriented principles were enacted were analysed. Reviews were appraised using the Joanna Briggs Institute Critical Appraisal Checklist, and findings were synthesised narratively using a state-of-the-art lens. Findings: Across reviews, youth-specific co-design principles emphasised authentic power-sharing, cultural and contextual responsiveness, reciprocity, and sustainability. Identified frameworks clustered into four types based on primary orientation, with process-focused approaches dominating the literature, whilst equity- and power-sharing focused frameworks were less consistently integrated. Conceptual inconsistency was evident, with “co-design” and “youth engagement” often used interchangeably. Although participatory methods were commonly reported, young people were often positioned in consultative roles rather than as decision-makers or leaders. Implications: State-of-the-art co-design extends beyond participatory methods to the integration of equity-driven principles across the intervention lifecycle. Limited evidence involving priority populations highlights the need for culturally responsive, power-sharing approaches that enable sustained youth leadership and meaningful inclusion within public health systems.

Background
Preconception care (PCC) supports women’s health, informed reproductive decision-making, and healthier pregnancies, yet access remains inequitable for migrant and refugee women. This study explored barriers and enablers to PCC use among African migrant and refugee women living in Victoria, Australia.
Methods
A qualitative descriptive study was conducted using semi-structured interviews with 12 African migrant and refugee women of reproductive age between August 2024 and March 2025. Data were analysed using a hybrid deductive-inductive thematic approach informed by the Theoretical Domains Framework and mapped to the Capability, Opportunity, Motivation-Behaviour model.
Results
Women reported limited awareness of PCC as a distinct preventive service and often relied on fragmented informal knowledge. Previous pregnancy experience and self-directed learning supported confidence and self-regulation. PCC use was constrained by limited proactive discussion in primary care, short consultations, language and cultural barriers, financial pressures, and difficulty navigating the health system. Social influences acted as both enablers and barriers: partner support and peer role models encouraged PCC use, while cultural and religious norms, privacy concerns, and gendered expectations discouraged care-seeking. Although most women valued PCC and intended to seek it before future pregnancies, unplanned pregnancy and competing settlement priorities often limited action.
Conclusions
PCC use was shaped less by lack of motivation than by structural and service-level barriers. Improving equity will require PCC to be proactively offered, embedded in routine primary care, and delivered through culturally safe, interpreter-supported, and community-informed approaches. These findings highlight the need for more inclusive preventive sexual and reproductive health systems for migrant and refugee communities.

Food insecurity is increasingly recognised by governments, international organisations, researchers, and civil society actors as a complex policy and governance challenge, shaped by social, economic, and food system pressures, and influenced by global events ​(1,2)​. To respond to the increasingly complex food insecurity problem in Australia, a structural policy approach is required. However, there is little understanding of how structural factors and potential policy responses are conceptualised by the various actors. This study adopts a qualitative, exploratory, and interpretive research design informed by a social constructionist perspective to explore how actors in Australia conceive of the problem of food insecurity and its implications for policy and practical action. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2026 with 23 representatives from relevant sectors. The interviews were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke’s six-step approach ​(3)​ with a predominantly inductive approach. Four main themes were developed around how participants constructed the problem of food insecurity: structural and economic causes; governance and policy failures; problems within the agri-food system; and the social dimensions, perceptions, and experiences of food insecurity. The analysis also identified proposed solutions, including raising income support and social benefits, expanding school lunch programs, improving federal and state policy alignment, and supporting farmers and farming communities, along with cross-cutting tensions between groups, highlighting opposing perspectives, unequal power relations, and different conceptualisations of responsibility in responses to food insecurity. Overall, findings highlight the broader implications of food insecurity and the diverse conceptualisations of the problem, underscoring the need for stronger community and policy interventions.

​​1. Zorbas C, Resnick D, Jones E, Suri S, Iruhiriye E, Headey D, et al. From promises to action: Analyzing global commitments to tackle hunger and food insecurity. Food Policy. 2025 Oct 1;136:102968. doi:10.1016/J.FOODPOL.2025.102968

​2. Mumah E, Hong Y, Chen Y. Exploring the reality of global food insecurity and policy gaps. Humanit Soc Sci Commun. 2025 Dec 1;12(1). doi:10.1057/s41599-025-05315-8

​3. Braun V, Clarke V. Thematic Analysis: A practical guide. London: Sage; 2021.

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BACKGROUND: There is limited literature that explores the relationship between area socioeconomic disadvantage and ischaemic heart disease (IHD) burden. To address this gap, we firstly investigated the relationship between area-based socioeconomic disadvantage and IHD hospitalisations in Victoria. This information was then used to identify high risk communities living in the catchment of the North East Public Health Unit (NEPHU) to inform future strategies.

METHODS: 2021 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Census data, 2022 ABS National Health Survey Data, and 2022-2023 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare hospitalisation data for Victoria were utilised to create population-level demographic profiles of socioeconomic factors, IHD risk factors and comorbid disease hospitalisation rates. Data was analysed using univariate and multivariate negative binomial regression models.

RESULTS: Census data included 6,494,346 persons across 276 population health areas. Health survey data included 1,804 households. Hospitalisation data included 21,004 IHD hospitalisations. In the univariate analysis, many area-based socioeconomic domains were positively associated with IHD hospitalisation, including prevalence of adults with poor English, overcrowding, low-income households, single parent families, unemployment, and low education attainment. Females were generally less effected by socioeconomic disadvantage than males. In the multivariate analysis, only prevalence of adults with poor English and single parent families demonstrated evidence of positive association, consistent with known complex interactions between social determinants of health (SDoH). High levels of socioeconomic disadvantage in areas across North East Melbourne correlated with high IHD hospitalisation rates.

CONCLUSIONS: Several interrelated SDoH are associated with IHD hospitalisations and a multi-faceted approach to address socioeconomic disadvantage is required to reduce the burden of IHD hospitalisations. Local population level data on the distributions of socioeconomic factors and IHD disease risk factors may be used to prioritise future interventions within North East Melbourne.