Our Work

Health is multidimensional including physical, emotional, social, intellectual, spiritual, occupational and environmental. Impacts on our health, both positive and negative come from the environments that we live, work, learn and play in.

The Public Health Unit works in partnership with the public, private and voluntary sectors at an individual and organisational level to improve wellbeing of the people who live in the Falkland Islands.

We provide a range of services including research, policy and project development, workshop delivery, 1-1 services, and creating health information resources.

Policies across all sectors, not just in the health sector can affect health and wellbeing. HiAP seeks to identify and avoid potential health harms and enhance health benefits to decision makers of proposed policies.

We advocate for the use of early screening Health Impact Assessments (HIA) across the Government to support and develop services and policies that emphasis wellbeing environments which can reduce the healthcare burden in the long-term.

Incorporating wellbeing practices in the workplace is beneficial for people and the organisation. Fostering and promoting wellbeing can help to prevent stress and create a positive working culture in organisations where employees feel supported and can thrive. Employee wellbeing programmes can increase engagement and organisational performance.

We can assist organisations through planning and policy development to delivery of bespoke sessions.  

While it is not possible to completely avoid stress and in fact some stress in small amounts can be helpful to us, however chronic stress can become a burden and have impacts on our wellbeing.

Alongside learning to recognise our triggers for stress and an awareness of how that shows up for us in our body or mind there are various other techniques that can help to manage or reduce our stress, including relaxation techniques such as visualisation, progressive muscle release, mindfulness, meditation, breathing techniques, yoga, and lifestyle modifications around sleep, nutrition and physical activity.

We can offer bespoke presentations and workshop delivery of stress management techniques for organisations.

Food provides nutrients and energy that nourishes and fuels our body. Choosing what we eat is guided by a number of factors including physical hunger, nutritional needs, taste, pleasure, cultural, personal and family traditions.

Developing or maintaining a healthy relationship to food, eating and movement is complex especially when we are exposed to so many messages about food, body image and movement.

We focus on the message that health is weight-neutral i.e. we nourish ourselves with food and activities that we enjoy to support our health irrespective of our body size.

We offer a Non-diet Nutrition Advice Service (self-referral and referred) for individuals, this approach may include mindful eating, hunger-fullness awareness training, responding to internal cues, joyful movement, exploration of previous dieting history and reframing our views around nutrition and body weight towards weight neutral.

Tobacco is a leading cause of preventable death.  To support best practice the smoking cessation offer provided by the Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS), through the Public Health Unit has been expanded and now includes a dedicated practitioner to provide guidance and support to people in their quit attempts. This addition to the Smoking Cessation Services, ensures that the community can gain support and assistance to benefit their health and stop smoking. Smoking Cessation Services are proven to be effective and cost-effective, with the latest research pointing out that our community are four times more likely to be successful with support than stopping unassisted.

It will provide a flexible and robust service to those who choose to give up smoking and offer friendly advice to those who are not quite ready yet.  The smoking Cessation Service follows the guidelines of the National Centre for Smoking Cessation and Training (NCSCT) adopted to local settings, ensuring constant support, motivation and most importantly a tailor-made service to the individual.  There will be group and one to one session’s offered at the initial assessment.  In the long term, it is important that the population can access high quality smoking cessation support by qualified professionals, with the aim that the population of the Falkland Islands will have the very best opportunities to stop smoking.