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 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.  

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 Approach Model Referral Scheme 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.

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. For individuals we can offer mindfulness and meditation as part of our Non-diet Approach Model Referral Scheme.