Municipal Public Health and Wellbeing Plan 2025-29

The Health Plan as part of our Council Plan

For the first time, we have embedded the Health Plan into our Council Plan 2025–29. Instead of being a separate plan, it now sits within the Council Plan, which outlines the outcomes and priorities Council aims to deliver to the Casey community over its four-year term.

Embedding our Health Plan will help us to:

• Ensure the Health Focus Areas are reflected across the Council Plan strategic outcomes and priorities, recognising that health and wellbeing objectives are everybody’s responsibility.
• Strengthen our collaboration across the organisation to ensure we are addressing the most important health and wellbeing needs together.

By working together to address the most important challenges facing people in Casey, we can build a city that gives everyone the best opportunity to live active, social, and healthy lives.

Insights used to develop the Municipal Public Health and Wellbeing Plan

Shape Your City community engagement project: An extensive engagement and public consultation during 2024 and 2025 to ensure our community vision and corporate planning documents continue to reflect community values, aspirations, and priorities.

The Victorian Public Health and Wellbeing Plan 2023–2027: Sets the direction for improving public health and wellbeing in Victoria over the next four years.

The City of Casey’s Health and Social Profile 2024: Looks at data on a variety of health and social topics across Casey to understand the challenges our community is facing.

Plans from local health and service organisations: Including the Department of Health, Enliven, Monash Health and South East Public Health Unit.

Evaluation and learnings from the City of Casey’s Health and Wellbeing Strategy 2021–2025: Evaluation and key learnings from the previous Health Plan allow us to build on what worked well and address any gaps.

Our Health Focus Areas

From the research above, we identified the most important health and wellbeing needs for our community. The six Health Focus Areas for 2025–29 are:

1. Healthy and Active Environments: Active transport options are available and accessible, with opportunities to be active in everyday life, and access to fresh and affordable food that supports healthy and thriving communities.
2. Connection and Participation: People feel connected to each other and their community, with various opportunities to participate and connect through cultural and creative avenues.
3. Community Empowerment: Greater access to information, resources, and supports leads to more informed and resilient individuals, households, and communities that can better tackle challenges such as the health impacts of climate change.
4. Tobacco, Vaping, Alcohol and Gambling Harm: Harm prevention measures through urban planning, community education, and advocacy protect communities from the negative impacts of tobacco, vaping, alcohol, and gambling.
5. Community Safety and Preventing Violence: Communities feel safe at home and in public, free from violence — including family violence, gender-based violence, and all forms of discrimination — enabling full participation in community life.
6. Affordable Housing and Homelessness: Access to appropriate, affordable housing options and services supporting those experiencing homelessness leads to greater stability, health, and safety outcomes.

Our principles

• Prevention: Any action that keeps people healthy and well for as long as possible by addressing risks of poor health, illness, or injury before they occur.
• Systems approach: We recognise and tackle the complex systems and structures that influence health and wellbeing outcomes, including social, economic, built, commercial, and natural environments.
• Equity: We recognise that experiences of health are different for everyone and that underlying determinants such as gender, age, disability, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, income, culture, and religion affect health outcomes.
• Across the lifespan: We recognise and address the specific needs and challenges faced by individuals at all stages of life, from childhood to old age.
• Impact: We identify, resource, measure, and report on activity that maximises health and wellbeing outcomes for our community.