Health Promotion in Brisbane City Council Community Arts and Lifestyle Committee

Running head: HEALTH PROMOTION 1
Health Promotion in Brisbane City Council Community Arts and Lifestyle Committee
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

HEALTH PROMOTION 2
Health Promotion in Brisbane City Council Community Arts and Lifestyle Committee
Brisbane city provides accessible and diverse recreational opportunities for
individuals of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities. Maintaining class world-health conditions
is one of the key goals of Brisbane’s health sector, and this can be achieved by helping
Brisbane residents to adapt to a healthy and active lifestyle. Furthermore, by attaining world-
class health conditions, the residents will have minimal exposure to disease with reduced
public health risks and will get to live in a healthy and natural environment. However, there
are few major health issues such as child abuse, ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder), and mood disorders, which are seemingly increasing in the local community and
refraining the city from achieving its health goal. These health issues need to be addressed in
order to ensure the positive health outcome and safety of residents of Brisbane.
Acknowledging Child Abuse in Brisbane
Child abuse is one of the most undesirable challenges that young children have to
experience. Such abuse to young children is initiated by either the parents or the caretakers,
who might undertake physical violence or emotional torturing, which often leads to a mental
breakdown in the kids. In addition to this, child abuse can be of any form, including physical
emotional or sexual abuse, and cause severe injuries to the child. Physical consequences of
abuse range from minor injuries to critical brain damage, whereas psychological
consequences are severe dissociative states and lower self-esteem. According to the
Department of Child Safety, Youth and Women (2019), around 121,813 concerns were
reported and documented by the department in Queensland about the risk of harm to a child,
of which 4,189 children were reported to be in need of protection. According to Child Family
Community Australia (2017), Queensland, which includes the Brisbane city, is one of the
highest contributors to the total child abuse cases reported in Australia, and no significant
decline in the number of cases has been reported from 2011 to 2016. This is a critical health

HEALTH PROMOTION 3
issue to be taken care of, and all the Brisbane residents have to come together to act
responsibly and address this issue with adequate strategies. The residents of the Brisbane city
are the most critical stakeholders to the health care system and should be vigilant to report
activities or suspected neglect or abuse of a child in their environment. Ensuring quality of
care, education, change of social norms, enhancement of parenting skills, and strengthening
the economic supports to the family are major intervention strategies to help address the issue
of child abuse in Brisbane.
Health Issue of ADHD in Brisbane
One of the critical medical condition identified in children is ADHD, which stands for
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. This medical condition affects the brain activity
and brain development of individuals, which hinders their ability to sit still or practice self-
control (Fayyad et al., 2017). Some of the common signs of ADHD include interrupting
without acknowledgment, fidgeting, lack of focus, and self-focused behaviors (Fayyad et al.,
2017). The cause of this medical condition can be deemed to be prenatal exposures, issues
with brain anatomy and function, head injuries, and premature birth. The three types of
ADHD includes child showing symptoms of impulsiveness, denoting the hyperactive type, a
child showing symptoms of inattentiveness, denoting the distractible type, and the third
combined type, which is characterized by both sets of behavior that is hyperactive and
impulsive along with distractibility and inattention. According to the Queensland
Commission for Children and Young People and Child Guardian’s reports for the year 2010,
over 23 percent of the young children in foster care and 17% of the children were identified
to be having attention deficit disorder or ADHD (Yanq.org.au., 2020). The Royal
Australasian College of Physicians provides evidence-backed recommendations of
inadequateness of addressing the disability with pharmacological treatment for children under
the age of six years. The incidence rate of ADHD in Queensland and Brisbane city is