Two basic principles guide a contemporary approach to health promotion and disease prevention programs, policy and practice:

  • using evidence to guide our decisions about interventions
  • consistently evaluating the effectiveness of interventions in terms of their impact.

We refer to evidence primarily as evaluation and research evidence for intervention effectiveness or cost effectiveness to help us answer the questions ‘What interventions work?’ and ‘Is the intervention cost effective?’

Evidence-based decision making is a key principle of the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008.