Introduction
Chronic diseases account for over 70% of Australia’s disease burden, placing increased strain on health, economic and community systems. Strengthening prevention requires a clear understanding of how the chronic disease prevention (CDP) system functions, its complexity, and where coordinated action can drive improvement. Partnering for Prevention is addressing this need by working with key government and non-government leaders to strengthen the Australian CDP system through co-design.

Methods
In the first of four planned phases, The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre conducted two online workshops with leaders from government and non-government health organisations working in primary CDP. Participants explored how the system currently functions, identified and prioritised areas for improvement, and highlighted actions to strengthen it.

Results
Prevention leaders (n=29 workshop 1; n=25 workshop 2) established a shared understanding of how the CDP system operates. Eight priority areas where strategic action could strengthen the system were identified: governance, data, cross-sector collaboration, workforce, leadership, evidence translation, funding, and equity. Leaders proposed practical actions across these domains, including establishing a national prevention governance structure and investment fund, coordinating shared national priorities, and developing frameworks for cross-sector collaboration. Other proposed actions focused on creating a nationally coordinated prevention data system, embedding equity in policy and legislation, building a skilled prevention workforce, and translating evidence into joint policies and actions. These early insights offer a foundation for a national roadmap to embed primary prevention into long-term public policy and funding, accelerating sustainable, equitable improvements in population health.

Conclusion
Partnering for Prevention demonstrates the value of co-design in harnessing collective expertise to identify system-level actions for reform. Findings from this and future phases focusing on secondary, tertiary and primordial prevention, as well as cross-sectoral and consumer perspectives, will contribute to a shared way forward for a more equitable, efficient and effective CDP system.

Introduction: Macrofinancial regimes are constellations of monetary, fiscal, and financial institutions that shape the creation and allocation of credit and money. In many contexts, macrofinancial regimes undermine the realisation of ‘health for all’ through impeding health-enabling public spending, and by imposing insufficient discipline on private finance to meet health-enabling policy objectives. This study aimed to provide a novel conceptualisation of health-enabling macrofinancial regimes (i.e., those that support global and planetary health equity), and to identify common pathways, barriers, and opportunities for establishing such regimes in different contexts.

Methods: We undertook a semi-structured critical realist review of diverse literature, coupled with targeted literature searches to explore novel insights and emergent themes. Insights on pathways for financing health for all were deductively coded against Gabor and Braun’s ‘green’ macrofinancial regime framework. Coding of insights on barriers and opportunities was performed inductively. Codes were developed and revised in an iterative fashion.

Results: We identified a range of policy and collective action pathways for establishing health-enabling macrofinancial regimes. These were organised into the following categories: i) building and protecting fiscal space (e.g., elimination of constraints on fiscal and monetary sovereignty); ii) steering finance to support health-enabling policies and programmes (e.g., use of expansive credit policies to regulate private financial flows); and iii) democratising finance (e.g., incorporating deliberative and participatory mechanisms into spending policy decision-making). The power of private finance, and the wider regime of late financial capitalism more broadly, pose a considerable barrier to implementing the changes foregrounded above. However, in many contexts, opportunities for progressive action through prefigurative projects and engagement with political movements, parties, and decision-makers across all levels of government are becoming increasingly apparent.

Conclusion: This study has outlined and proposed some potentially important yet critically underexplored avenues for research and advocacy efforts on building health-enabling macrofinancial regimes in diverse contexts.

Problem
It is widely recognised across the prevention sector that chronic disease prevention in Australia is underfunded. The challenge lies not only in the level of investment available but also in how funds are allocated across the prevention system. Understanding how funding decisions are made, and how money is channelled and managed, is essential to making the best use of existing resources and building a more sustainable prevention system.

What you did
The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre (Prevention Centre) funded the research project' How do we fund Public Health in Australia? How should we?', which mapped how prevention funding flows from governments to organisations delivering programs. Building on the evidence published from this work, the Prevention Centre convened a cross-jurisdictional leadership forum to explore the barriers and enablers that shape how prevention funding is allocated across the system, with a focus on improving how funding works rather than advocating for increases in the amount. The forum brought together senior executives from Commonwealth, state and territory health departments and agencies, held under Chatham House rules to support open and constructive discussion, to identify practical pathways for funding reform.

Results
The forum will generate a clearer understanding of the challenges and opportunities for strengthening national prevention funding mechanisms, along with agreed priorities to improve how prevention funding is mobilised, monitored and sustained in Australia. This presentation will share outcomes from the forum^.

Lessons
Insights from the forum will contribute to stronger coordination of prevention leadership across jurisdictions and will support work with governments to embed prevention more effectively within funding frameworks. This includes complementing existing efforts to strengthen prevention funding, such as the Productivity Commission’s proposal for a National Framework for Investment in Prevention and enhancements to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s reporting on public health expenditure.

^ The forum will be held in December 2025, so preliminary findings cannot be included in this abstract.

Australia’s prevention landscape has been shaped by short-term, project-based funding, which can produce isolated successes rather than sustained, system-wide improvements in health and wellbeing. Addressing complex public health challenges such as unhealthy food environments requires a shift from prevention programs to prevention systems that are embedded, enabling, and adaptive.
The Healthy Eating Advisory Service (HEAS), delivered by National Nutrition Foundation and supported by the Victorian Government, exemplifies this shift. Since 2012, HEAS has evolved from a service into an enabling system for implementing and sustaining Victorian Government policy, including the Healthy choices: policy directive in Victorian public health services, which has achieved high compliance for four years. HEAS is strategic prevention infrastructure, connecting government policy to sector-wide practice change, that provides health professionals and food service staff with information, resources and digital tools, enabling them to engage local stakeholders, and plan, implement and maintain change.
HEAS’s evolution reflects a shift in purpose, relationships, and capacity to act. Government and health service leadership creates conditions for collaboration and shared ownership, while HEAS empowers active partners that shape change. By strengthening relationships with health promotion professionals, government departments, suppliers, and health service leaders, HEAS surfaces structural barriers and workforce gaps. These insights led to co-designed and adaptive support models, including coaching, communities of practice, and resources, building capability across the system. By supporting change-makers, HEAS shifts implementation from compliance-driven activity to embedded, evolving practice, demonstrating how systems change is sustained through collective agency, strategic infrastructure and measurable systems impact.
Using a systems lens, this case re-frames prevention as strategic investment. Sustained impact requires funders to move beyond isolated programs and invest in infrastructure that adapts with complexity, enabling long-term, transformative change in public health systems.

Poor diet is a leading contributor to chronic disease and premature death in Victoria.

As one of nine Victorian Local Public Health Units (LPHUs), the North Eastern Public Health Unit (NEPHU) is providing support and coordinating collective action on healthier food environments.

The NEPHU Local Food Environments project, developed in partnership with Sustain: The Australian Food Network, provides a comprehensive analysis of local food environments across ten municipalities in Melbourne's north-east.

This initiative aimed to equip local governments with data-driven insights to inform the development of their municipal public health and wellbeing plans (2025-2029).

The project utilised a repeatable and systematic food environment mapping process that was adapted from a published methodology (Needham et al, 2022) and gave access to the ArcGIS Living Atlas, enabling interactive analysis against local neighbourhood and population characteristics.

Key findings highlight the critical role of local food environments in shaping community health and wellbeing, whereby 1700 (66.8%) of the 2544 categorised food outlets were classified as unhealthy (i.e. local take-away, take-away chain or a convenience store).

Further catchment wide insights included:
-that there is unequal access to affordable & healthy food across the catchment, with lower socio-economic areas having a higher ratio of unhealthy to healthy food outlets
-that ‘food deserts’ exist across the catchment where access to essential groceries and diverse food options are limited
-that there is a need for training and capacity building in healthy food environment planning, including consistency in measurement and classification approaches, and
-that there is trend of unhealthy food outlets clustering within shopping centres.

The project outlined actionable recommendations to support food systems transformation at a catchment level, informing NEPHUs next four-year Catchment Plan (2025-2029).

By providing local governments with data necessary for informed decision-making, this project contributes to the broader goal of healthier food environments.

Preventative health outcomes are strengthened when schools, communities, and systems work together to create supportive environments for children and young people. School Food Matters (SFM) delivers a suite of programs in Tasmanian schools that showcase a collaborative model for improving nutrition, building food literacy, and addressing inequities in access to nutritious food. Working alongside government departments, local food producers, community partners, and regional stakeholders, SFM supports school communities to implement integrated, curriculum-linked, food initiatives.

This presentation will draw on three core programs:
• Foodies – connecting young people to local food systems, hospitality and agriculture
• SmartFood – working with school canteens on providing healthy choices and a whole school approach to eating well.
• School Lunch Program (SLP), which provides nutritious, free hot lunches in 45 Tasmanian government schools. This program is currently delivering 14000 meals a week to Tasmanian students and is the largest of this model in Australia.

Together, these programs demonstrate how preventative health interventions can be embedded in school systems. These programs have guiding principles around equity, skilled workforce development, utilising local fresh produce, food literacy, and an emphasis on providing a designated social eating time. Evidence emerging highlights improved student food confidence and willingness to try new foods, increased capacity to deliver food education, strengthened school–community relationships, and enhanced connections with local producers and regional economies.

By positioning schools as central settings for health promotion, these collaborative approaches contribute to reducing the risk of diet-related disease and support children’s engagement at school. The presentation will outline key enablers and participants will gain practical insights into delivering school food programs at scale in an Australian context. This work illustrates how strategic partnerships can nourish not only students, but the broader systems that shape their wellbeing.

Problem
Australia has strong prevention expertise across research, policy and practice, but system constraints often limit collaboration to individual relationships and short-term projects. Evidence shows that approaches developed through enduring research-policy-practice partnerships are more likely to be implemented effectively. Strengthening prevention therefore requires sustained mechanisms that embed policy and practice perspectives through the research-to-action continuum; from identifying priorities to implementing and translating findings into real-world change.

What you did
The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre (Prevention Centre) is the largest collaboration of prevention researchers, policy makers, and health practitioners. Established in 2013 under the NHMRC Partnership Centres for Better Health initiative, it is now in its twelfth year, supported by government and non-government funding partners. The Prevention Centre connects people and evidence to provide a coordinated voice for prevention, incubate solutions and support evidence-informed action. It does this by convening national dialogues, partnering to generate and apply evidence, translating knowledge into practical resources and building workforce capability.

Results
The Prevention Centre has built a network of 1000-plus researchers and policy makers, partnered with 14 Centres of Research Excellence, supported over 400 emerging leaders, contributed to nearly 800 peer-reviewed papers and thousands of translation outputs including policy briefs, fact sheets, webinars and news stories. Its work has advanced policy-relevant research on systems change and prevention investment, and pioneered methods such as dynamic simulation modelling and implementation approaches now used nationally and internationally. Dedicated communication platforms and tailored tools have strengthened knowledge translation and accelerated the use of evidence in policy and practice.

Lessons
The Prevention Centre’s experience demonstrates the impact of long-term, structured collaboration to embed evidence in action. Sustained partnership enables shared priorities to be co-developed tested and applied consistently across systems. As prevention challenges evolve, leveraging these established structures will be essential for continued impact and system-wide improvement.