Abstract
There is a lack of consensus about what men's health constitutes in Australia. The absence of a widely accepted definition has been problematic for establishing state and national men's health policies. I consider that one impediment to the implementation of state and federal men's health policies has been a lack of willingness to approach men's health from a broad public health perspective. In particular, scant attention has been paid to exploring lay perspectives of how men define and understand health, and in turn, how these relate to significant policy problems such as men's health service use. I conclude by suggesting that a focus on men's lay perspectives of their health emerging from the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland provides a useful framework to guide men's health policy discussion in Australia.
Highlights
Defining men's health as a policy problem In Australia professional interest in men's health has grown markedly over the past decade [1]
The last two years alone has seen both the Australian Medical Association and the Royal Australian College of General Practice release position statements relating to men's health [2,3]
While there are inconsistent ways of defining men's health, a common concern raised in almost all recent scholarship relating to men's health in Australia is the lack of commitment to developing and implementing men's health policies at state and federal levels [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Summary
Defining men's health as a policy problem In Australia professional interest in men's health has grown markedly over the past decade [1]. While there are inconsistent ways of defining men's health, a common concern raised in almost all recent scholarship relating to men's health in Australia is the lack of commitment to developing and implementing men's health policies at state and federal levels [1,2,3,4,5,6]. New South Wales is the only state in Australia to have succeeded in producing a men's health policy document that has been endorsed by a state Health Minister [5,7]. It is worth noting, that this document – Moving Forward in Men's Health – was never explicitly labelled as a policy. It is this latter concern that I discuss in this paper
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