GLOBE Community Based Prevention Forum

Deakin University’s Centre for Global Preventive Health and Nutrition (GLOBE) has a 15-year history of prevention research delivered in partnership with health services, local government, population health units, and other community-based organisations in remote, rural, and regional Victoria. This partnership has produced world-leading evidence on the use of systems thinking as a framework to strengthen community engagement in the conception of whole-of-community approaches to promote child health and wellbeing.

In June 2026, GLOBE’s Dynamic Implementation Research group, led by Associate Professor Serene Yoong, hosted a community-based prevention forum to hear from our partners in the Victorian prevention sector. Building on our foundation of whole-of-community prevention research, the forum was designed to support better understanding of the opportunities and challenges with enabling implementation of evidence-based health promotion initiatives in non-metropolitan communities.

There is a growing understanding in the population health and implementation science research communities of a phenomenon called the “implementation equity gap.” The population health literature offers a large and growing body of evidence-based initiatives, proven to improve the health and well-being of children and young people. These initiatives, however, are almost always developed and tested in metropolitan communities. This means often translate very poorly to, remote, rural, and regional communities where there is a greater need for health promotion activities and support.

At the forum – we asked our partners for their reflections in 3 key areas:

1. The priority areas they are focusing on in their work related to child health and wellbeing
2. The specific challenges they have faced when implementing child health initiatives in their communities
3. The strategies they have used, or opportunities they see, to better enable prevention organisations to implement these initiatives in remote, rural, and regional contexts.

The main findings from the forum can be found in our research summary, published alongside this article – but the reflections from attendees at the forum were wide-ranging and informative. We heard that work in this space addresses a broad range of prevention priorities, including both immediate health behaviours (that is, healthy eating, active living) as well as the ways in which prevention organisations work and function (that is, partnership and capacity building, community engagement). The challenges that were shared provided important detail on the practical implications of implementing metro-centric initiatives in remote, rural, and regional communities (that is, limited access to relevant evidence, greater needs for partnership and collaboration, and reliance on community volunteers and champions). The strategies and potential opportunities to address these challenges demonstrated clear roles for innovations led by prevention practitioners (that is, continuing to develop and share new best practices for community engagement, supporting cross-sector learning and capacity building) – but equally important were clear spaces where researchers could contribute to, (i.e. through the creation of more accessible and locally-relevant sources of evidence) and government could support prevention practice (that is, through the design of planning cycles and structures which govern the way in which the prevention sector plan and are resourced).

In partnership with our network of remote, rural, and regional Victorian prevention organisations, the GLOBE team are now designing the next generation of implementation research to embed systems thinking in prevention practice. Extending from our shared legacy of community-based trials which have demonstrated how systems thinking can be applied to understand and respond to the complex drivers of community health – we are now exploring how these tools can understand and address these complex challenges of implementation in remote, rural, and regional settings.