Our Ways Of Working
Guiding principles
Women’s Health Victoria’s ways of working are guided by four principles:
- We work from a feminist framework that incorporates a rights based approach.
- We acknowledge the critical importance of an understanding of all of the determinants of health and of illness to achieving better health outcomes.
- We understand that the complexities involved in achieving better health outcomes for women require well-considered, forward thinking, multi-faceted and sustainable solutions.
- We commit to ‘doing our work well’; we understand that trust and credibility result from transparent and accountable behaviours.
Specific ways of working
In order to achieve our Strategic Goals, Women’s Health Victoria has adopted four primary ways of working that express these principles.
By women, for women
We understand that listening to the diversity of women’s experience is an essential part of creating women’s health knowledge and expertise. Our program of work is entirely directed to making a difference to health outcomes for women.
Leading and influencing
We recognise that system-wide change is required to address health inequality and improve health outcomes for women. In order to exert most influence we will focus our effort on policy and opinion leaders, health analysts, planners and researchers, and on health educators and peak bodies.
We will proactively raise the issues critical to women’s wellbeing in the public and health policy arenas, and participate and support advocacy strategies directed toward informing and influencing decision makers.
Collaborating and building capacity
We understand that systemic change is not achieved in isolation but requires coordinated and collaborative effort.
We will actively foster and maintain diverse relationships that promote shared focus and joint effort. We will provide mentoring and support to groups and organisations involved in women’s health promotion and advocacy.
Innovating
We understand that old paradigms may not achieve new outcomes or sustainable change. We will continue to develop new models and approaches through innovation in our own practice, adopting a continuous action learning cycle in which we trial and evaluate innovations and build new practice evidence.
Content Reviewed: 25 February 2009
Last Updated: 25 February 2009