Winner Announcement: 2019 National Competition for Excellence in Hepatitis C Health Promotion

For World Hepatitis Day 2019, we are thrilled to announce the winner of the 2019 National Competition for Excellence in Hepatitis C Health Promotion. The competition ran for the first time in 2018, and positive feedback from the inaugural competition encouraged us to go again in 2019!

The goal of the National Competition for Excellence in Hepatitis C Health Promotion is to encourage innovation in the field and to foster the continued development of effective health promotion messages through engagement with social research.

This year saw a marked increase in interest in the competition with twice the number of entries received in 2019 than 2018 and once again, an extremely strong field of quality entries were received.

Having struggled to choose between the many great submissions, the judges are pleased to announce, ‘Insiders News’ Issue 5 by the NSW Users & AIDS Association (NUAA) as the first prize winners for the 2019 competition. They will receive an award of $5,000 to further support their excellent work. ‘Insiders News’ is a magazine-styled resource for inmates in NSW with a focus on HCV prevention and harm reduction from a peer perspective. You can view the winning issue of ‘Insiders News’ here. We are sure you will all join us in congratulating the NUAA team on this wonderful achievement!

Given the high standard of entries, the judges decided (as they did in 2018) to award an additional ‘honourable mention’ prize of $1,000. This prize goes to the ‘BYO Fits Campaign’ by the North Richmond Community Health Centre (NRCHC). The campaign features two print-based posters and a custom tin advertising the use of ‘fresh’/sterile injecting equipment through the concept of ‘pleasure’. 

Both groups are recognised here for their efforts in developing effective, creative and research-informed resources that seek to ‘push the boundaries’ of what’s possible in HCV health promotion. Both resources focus on engaging affected communities in respectful ways and seeking to improve health outcomes by tackling critical issues such as stigma and rarely discussed concepts such as pleasure and drug use. Please join us in congratulating our winners on their outstanding achievement!

We will be holding an event to present the prizes at the upcoming Australasian Viral Hepatitis Elimination Conference being held in Sydney on the 5-6 August 2019. If you are attending the conference, we invite you to also attend this event, which will be held during the Conference Networking Dinner on day one of the conference. Please see the conference website for further details.

The judges would like to acknowledge the quality of all the resources submitted to the competition and recognise the effort that went into preparing the submissions and addressing the recommendations that formed the basis for the award (Technical Review Report).

Judging Panel: Prof Carla Treloar (Panel Chair, CSRH, UNSW), Prof Suzanne Fraser (ARCSHS, LaTrobe University), Dr Jack Wallace (Burnet Institute), Ms Annie Madden (CSRH, UNSW).

This project is supported by UNSW Knowledge Exchange and the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University.