Hospitals & health services
Hospitals and health services play an important role in helping staff and visitors make healthy lifestyle choices.
'Better health through prevention' is:
- A key focus of the Victorian Government’s Health 2040: Advancing health, access and care policy
- A target in the Victorian Cancer Plan, “at least 80 per cent of health services’ retail outlets and vending machines meeting Healthy Choices by 2024”.
By providing healthy foods and drinks, your health service will:
- meet the Department of Health policy requirements
- communicate consistent messages about healthy eating and healthy lifestyles to the community
- have a food service which aligns with the health messages of the organisation
- meet community expectations about promoting healthy lifestyles
Healthy choices: policy directive for Victorian public health services
Supplying healthier foods and drinks to your staff and visitors is now part of the Department of Health’s Healthy choices: policy directive for Victorian public health services.
The Policy directive applies to all public health services across all of their sites and facilities (such as hospitals, integrated community health services and public residential aged care services) and covers:
- in-house retail food outlets (including items purchased by staff and visitors from patient/resident menus)*
- all vending machines
- all staff/visitor catering
*Victorian public health services are encouraged to implement the Policy directive across all of their retail food outlets – both in-house and privately managed. This includes retail outlets that have food supplied from an inpatient/resident food service, managed by an external contractor.
Which 'Healthy Choices' information does your health service need?
| Healthy choices: policy directive for Victorian public health services | Original Healthy Choices guidelines* |
| Are you a health service implementing the Policy directive? | Are you a health service implementing the Healthy Choices guidelines? |
| Quick links: | Quick links: |
| Healthy choices: policy directive overview | Healthy Choices guidelines^ |
| Understanding the Policy directive drinks targets | |
| Healthy choices: policy directive implementation resources |
*All Victorian public health services are strongly encouraged to implement the Healthy choices: policy directive for Victorian public health services across all of their retail food outlets – both in-house and privately/commercially managed. However, the original Healthy Choices guidelines can still be applied in private health services and public health services with privately/commercially managed retail food outlets.
^ Please note this link will re-direct you to the area of our website dedicated to the original Healthy Choices guidelines.
