Unlocking the potential of law to prevent chronic disease

Project title: The role of public health law in preventing chronic disease

Start date: March 2015
Estimated end date: March 2018

What is the issue?

Public health law has delivered many of the most celebrated successes in health promotion globally including gun laws, mandatory seatbelt use in motor vehicles, excise taxes on alcohol and the plain packaging of tobacco.

Despite these successes, public health law remains an underutilised public health tool. One reason for this is that while governments have been able to employ effective legal responses to public health challenges, especially where interventions have clear measures of effectiveness (e.g. reduced smoking rates), there has been limited rigorous measurement and evaluation of the impact of the broad range of public health law affecting the health of populations.

Also, public health law comes in a number of guises including statute, government regulation, common law and ‘soft’ law, not all of which are well recognised. This means that policy makers often do not know what works in preventing chronic disease and which legal strategies have little, or unintended, effects. Consequently, policy makers lack the empirical evidence to justify significant public health policy changes.

How is the project addressing the issue?

This PhD project aims to develop methods and processes to facilitate the evaluation of public health law’s impact.

The project will:

• Investigate the impact of case law on the regulation of alcohol availability in Australia
• Conduct systematic reviews, into topics including the effectiveness of ‘soft law’ or alternative legal systems (e.g. community-led alcohol restrictions)
• Use qualitative methods such as case studies and stakeholder interviews to evaluate public health law interventions in terms of effectiveness and implementation.

Relevance for practice

The project hypothesises that improving the generation and translation of evidence about public health law to cater for the complex needs of policy makers will help to garner the political support necessary to maximise the potential of powerful, acceptable and sustainable public health law in preventing chronic disease.

The project aims to develop empirical research tools that policy makers and researchers can use to identify deficiencies in existing public health law (in terms of power, effectiveness, acceptability and sustainability), and to inform the design of legislative reform. These tools will build the capacity of those invested in prevention to respond to the epidemic of chronic disease with innovative, tailored and practical policy models.

Through this work, the implementation of effective and cost-effective public health law holds the potential to strengthen national capacity, leadership and governance in area of disease prevention, particularly in addressing the health inequalities suffered by disenfranchised and disadvantaged populations.

What are the expected outcomes?

• Identify who makes public health law in the area of chronic disease prevention (incorporating both formal and informal health governance forums)
• Determine the strengths and weaknesses of various types of public health law in specific populations
• Develop new methodological approaches to evaluating public health law, policy and regulation to provide fresh insights for policy makers and researchers in prevention
• Translate the evidence generated by the project into clear and practical guidelines and a strategy for prioritising the use of public health laws in chronic disease prevention.