Promoting better health and wellbeing
Personal choices and behaviours are important contributors to poor health and wellbeing outcomes, including unhealthy diet, substance abuse, lack of exercise and disregarding medical advice. Reasons include lack of willpower, short-term thinking and difficulties assessing the likely consequences of health-related decisions. We also tend to underestimate how much our personal choices, such as vaccination, medical donations and looking after our own health, affect others.
Influencing behavioural factors for health and wellbeing provides the opportunity to help people achieve better outcomes while governments struggle with rising health expenditure. Behavioural policies have been used successfully to support individual decision-making, including making health-related information more accessible and encouraging change away from poor habits.