Introduction: People living in regional Australia have lower rates of five-year survival for all cancers combined, partly due to longer symptom appraisal and help-seeking behaviour. The Find Cancer Early (FCE) campaign aims to address these disparities by increasing awareness of cancer symptoms in people aged over 40 years in regional Western Australia and encourage them to see a doctor earlier. This abstract explores the effectiveness of targeted mass media campaigns, and the barriers to accessing healthcare that may hinder equitable cancer outcomes.

Methods: The long-running FCE campaign employs impactful mass media advertising, including the recent wave, ‘Give yourself the best chance.' Campaigns leverage personal testimonies from local cancer survivors to resonate with the regional target audience. The 2023-24 campaign evaluation consisted of an online cross-sectional survey (n=1248) to assess campaign awareness, reactions and impact, including effectiveness in raising awareness of key cancer symptoms and intention to seek medical attention among adults aged 40 and above. The survey also collected data on personal concerns and barriers to seeing a doctor regarding cancer symptoms.

Results: Evaluation indicates that the campaign successfully reached 70% of the target audience, with over half (56%) recalling three or more common cancer symptoms, significantly higher in people who recognised the campaign. Around 97% believed that detecting cancer early means it can be treated more successfully. However, barriers to taking action remain: Overall, 42% expressed concerns that their symptoms might not be serious enough, while 21% feared receiving a cancer diagnosis. Furthermore, 58% of those who said access to a doctor was not very easy, reported issues related to the availability of any doctor, significantly higher in remote regions, highlighting systemic barriers that impede access to care.

Conclusion: The FCE campaign prioritises equity by involving regional community voices. Further action is required to address personal concerns and social determinants influencing early diagnosis of cancer to ensure that outcomes are not determined by location.

Problem
People accessing community services are more likely to smoke and bear a disproportionate share of the harm caused by tobacco.

WA research shows people accessing community services want to quit smoking but are unable to seek appropriate support. The community services sector is in a unique position to assist people to quit smoking due to their existing, trusted relationships and ability to provide personalised ongoing support.

However, staff at community services don’t always view tobacco as a priority, which is a barrier for us.
What you did
Since 2016, we have been working alongside community service organisations to help them address tobacco. During this time, we have made significant progress by adopting an organisational change approach.
To further improve program delivery, we focused on the engagement with services. We commissioned Common Cause Australia to conduct 15 focus groups to look at how we frame our message, and what frames would work best to motivate community service staff and management to increase access to evidence-based quitting support for clients who smoke.
Results
Results of the testing phase will be presented at the conference, and key insights and qualitative data shared from the focus groups. Key message frames will be presented and reasons for their effectiveness explored.
Lessons
The importance of getting the language right to connect with your target audience. All future projects will prioritise language as part of the codesign process, as well as continuing to engage with a stakeholder group to refine and/or change language as needed.

Background: People experiencing incarceration are amongst some of the most marginalised in our society, and experience significant health disparities. Older prisoners (those aged 50 and over) are the fastest growing cohort amongst incarcerated people, often experiencing significant or complex health challenges associated with incarceration and with accelerated aging. Both the rising number of older prisoners and their complex needs are becoming an increasingly prominent issue for correctional agencies to both meet these needs but also support their successful reintegration into society upon release.
Low health literacy is seen as a critical determinant of health inequalities affecting marginalised populations. When health literacy initiatives are effectively designed and executed, tailored to the needs of older prisoners, they have the potential to save resources, lower rates of reoffending, and enhance public safety. Nevertheless, older inmates transitioning into the community are often neglected, resulting in insufficient interventions to cater to their unique needs.
Method: Interviews and workshop inspired by the Optimising Health Literacy and Access (Ophelia) process were held with stakeholders including correctional staff, transitional support services and advocates.
Inductive themes from transcripts underwent abductive analysis against frameworks on health literacy and health literacy responsiveness, as well as current literature on health education interventions amongst prisoners, community-dwelling older people, and marginalised groups.
Results: Opportunities were identified to improve the health literacy prospects of older prisoners throughout the custodial process from custody to reintegration. To date, there are no targeted interventions to meet the health literacy needs of the older person with experience of incarceration.
Key lessons for policy, practice and intervention development were to address institutionalisation and improve equivalence of health, provide consistent pre-release planning and transitional support, and cross-sector collaboration to achieve throughcare.

Introduction:
Individuals identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and other diverse (LGBTQIA+) are more likely to be insufficiently active and have poorer health compared to their counterparts. Recreation centres offer physical activity opportunities but are under-utilised by LGBTQIA+ persons. Little is known about LGBTQIA+ individuals’ recreation centre experiences and perceived strategies for improving the inclusion and accessibility of recreation settings to enhance access to physical activity opportunities. This study sought to explore recreation centre experiences of LGBTQIA+ individuals and strategies for enhancing inclusion and accessibility.

Methods:
Nineteen qualitative interviews were conducted with adults (68% aged <35 years) who identified as LGBTQIA+ and who were employees, regular visitors, or residents of a Melbourne municipality. They were asked about their views on using three recreation centres but were not required to have had previous experience at these centres and could be current or previous users of recreation centres elsewhere. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analysed using content analysis.

Results:
The key themes spanned providing accessible and inclusive facilities, programs, communications, centre culture, and partnerships. Although most participants mainly had positive experiences with the recreation centres’ programs and facilities, they identified accessibility barriers (e.g., inaccessible changing rooms, lack of privacy) and offered recommendations for improvement (e.g., offering classes tailored to LGBTQIA+ community, gender-neutral changing facilities, private cubicles) of recreation centres generally. Participants also recommended having events for the LGBTQIA+ community, staff training, displaying rainbow signage, using inclusive language, and an ongoing commitment to LGBTQIA+ inclusion.

Conclusion:
This study adds essential knowledge regarding LGBTQIA+ individuals’ experiences of recreation centres and provides actionable recommendations for improving inclusion and accessibility in recreational settings. These findings may be applicable to other recreation and physical activity contexts (e.g., sport, physical education) and may potentially improve physical activity and health outcomes among the LGBTQIA+ community.

In March 2023, the Australian Government announced that development of a 10 Year National Action Plan for LGBTIQA+ Health and Wellbeing (Action Plan).

Evidence overwhelmingly shows that LGBTIQ+ people experience significant health and wellbeing disparities compared to the general population. LHA strongly put the case that, while LGBTIQ+ people are a priority population in many existing national strategies, these lacked coordination of goals, strategies and evaluation, despite evidence of continued or worsening outcomes in many areas of health and wellbeing.

LHA has been actively engaged in processes developing the Action Plan—as a participant in the Government’s LGBTIQA+ Health and Wellbeing 10-year National Action Plan Expert Advisory Group (EAG), alongside several of its Full Member organisations and LGBTIQ+ sector partners.

LHA received funding from the Australian Government to support national consultations for the development of the Action Plan. It delivered Rainbow Realities - In-depth analyses of large-scale LGBTQA+ health and wellbeing data in Australia (with La Trobe University and others), which brings together existing findings and more than 50 new analyses from six large scale surveys of LGBTQA+ populations in Australia.

At this time, work on the Action Plan is underway. The Government has indicated it expects to release the Action Plan by the end of 2024. With an election looming in 2025, timing is critical.

This presentation will explore the learnings and challenges from campaigning for the Action Plan, participating in its development, and the emerging risks and opportunities for implementing the plan. Depending on Government action over coming months, the presentation may explore the implications and consequences of not delivering on the Action Plan.

Introduction: Healthy Beginnings for HNEKids (HB4HNEKids) is a mHealth (text message) intervention that aims to support parents/carers with evidence-based age and stage appropriate text messages across the first 2000 days. There is limited evidence that has examined the dose-response relationship in mHealth interventions. This study aimed to explore the impact of dose on HB4HNEKids.
Methods: Families were randomly allocated to either a high dose (up to 5 messages per month) or low dose group (up to 3.5 messages per month) upon recruitment. Infant feeding status, engagement (click rates) and acceptability measures were routinely collected. The cost of sending messages for each group was also reported.
Results: Since 2021, 5858 parents with children between 0-2 years old have participated in the program and over 307,000 messages have been sent. Significantly more participants opted out of the high dose arm (6.8%) compared to low dose (3.9%) in the first six months (p<0.001). There were no significant differences in feeding status between high and low dose. Overall, there were no significant differences in click rates between groups. The majority of high dose participants (95%) and low dose participants (90%) agreed or strongly agreed that they would recommend the program to other caregivers. For high dose, the cost of sending messages was an average of $12.96 per participant, compared to low dose which was $9.32.
Conclusion: The high dose schedule had a higher rate of opt-outs to the program and cost more to deliver, whilst click rates and acceptability of the program did not differ by dose. These findings indicate that a lower dose of HB4HNEKids could be considered more favourable. The determination of the ideal dose for HB4HNEKids will assist in refining the program prior to wider scale-up and contributes to the evidence gap in identifying a suitable dose for mHealth interventions.

Problem:
The Mareeba community required resourcing to help a primary care service embed preventive health initiatives.
What you did:
Mareeba and Communities Family Health Care (MCFHC) is a social enterprise that owns and manages Mareeba Medical Clinic. In 2024, MCFHC, partnering with the National Rural Health Alliance (NRHA) was successful in securing funding through a Department of Health and Aged Care Innovative Models of Care (IMOC) grant to trial a model of care developed by the NRHA known as Primary care Rural Integrated Multidisciplinary Health Services (PRIM-HS).
This model emphasises viable community ownership, leadership and collaboration with local stakeholders to strengthen preventive health initiatives, build capacity in the multidisciplinary workforce and to expand services to the wider surrounding communities in the region. To achieve this, the community requires population health and socioeconomic data about the community. The model requires access to block or blended funding in addition to any income earned through means such as MBS and private billing.
Results:
While the IMOC grant does not provide block funding envisaged by communities and the NRHA, it enables MCFHC to leverage additional resources to develop their local strategy, build capacity to achieve their goals in preventive health care delivery and health promotion.
Lessons:
This presentation will explore how MCFHC in their trial of the PRIM-HS model is engaging the community through established local events, including the Annual Wheelbarrow race (Mareeba to Chillagoe) and the FNQ Field Day Agricultural Expo (Mareeba) to promote health services and health checks and is building capacity to deliver better community mental health through strategic investments such as training mental health champions and fostering social prescribing.
Achieving these goals necessitates navigating political landscapes, fostering relationships at the local, state and national level and taking on a grassroots whole of community approach to addressing health needs.