Health and Human Development: should I choose it?

Concepts of health

Youth health and wellbeing

Health and nutrition

Developmental transitions

Youth health literacy

Unit 3 AoS 1: Understanding health and wellbeing

This area builds the measuring instruments used for the rest of the course. It starts with health and wellbeing as five interacting dimensions — physical, social, emotional, mental and spiritual — treated as dynamic and subjective, with illness defined alongside them, and the argument that optimal health and wellbeing is a resource for the individual, the nation and the world. The indicators follow, and they must be defined precisely: incidence, prevalence, morbidity, burden of disease, disability-adjusted life years with its years of life lost and years lived with disability components, life expectancy, health-adjusted life expectancy, mortality and self-assessed health status. Finally you explain variation between population groups using biological, sociocultural and environmental factors, and account for the contribution of smoking and vaping, alcohol, overweight and obesity, and nutritional imbalance to Australia's health status.

Unit 3 AoS 2: Promoting health in Australia

Here you explain why Australians live so much longer than in 1900 and how the country keeps trying to improve. The historical account runs through old public health, the biomedical approach, the social model of health and the Ottawa Charter's action areas, and you need to argue each framework's strengths and weaknesses rather than list its features. Health promotion for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples is treated in its own right and tied to social justice. Nutrition is the applied case, covering the Australian Dietary Guidelines, the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Guide to Healthy Eating, plus the practical challenges that stop people changing what they eat. The area ends with Medicare, private health insurance, the PBS and the NDIS, judged on funding, sustainability, access and equity.

Unit 4 AoS 1: Global health and human development

The scale widens to the world. Human development is defined and measured through the Human Development Index, and you must be able to name the indicators it combines and argue both its advantages and its limitations, since it says nothing about distribution, environment or safety. You then compare low-, middle- and high-income countries on their characteristics and on health status, including where Australia sits among them. The explanations for the gaps are the core content: access to safe water and sanitation, poverty and discrimination, each traced through to a specific health outcome. Sustainability is defined across its environmental, social and economic dimensions, and the area closes with global trends — climate change, conflict, mass migration, world trade, tourism and digital technologies — and what each does to health and human development.

Unit 4 AoS 2: Health and the Sustainable Development Goals

This area is about the global response. You learn why the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals matter for health and human development, then work through SDG 3 in detail along with its relationships to the goals on poverty, hunger, education, gender equality, clean water and responsible consumption, because those relationships are examined and not just the goals themselves. The World Health Organization's goal and objectives come next, followed by the types of aid — bilateral, multilateral and non-government organisation aid — together with the features that make an aid program effective. Australia's own aid program and its partnerships supply the case material, and the area finishes with individual and social action, meaning what an ordinary person can do and how collective action reaches further.

Unit 1: Understanding health and wellbeing (not examined, foundational)

Unit 1 is where the vocabulary begins. You meet the concepts of health and wellbeing and the dimensions of health before applying them to young people specifically: the health status of young Australians, the indicators used to describe it, and the sociocultural influences — family, peers, education, income and culture — that shape it. Nutrition is introduced here as well, covering the major nutrients, their food sources and their role in health, along with food selection models and the influences on what young people actually eat. None of this is set on the end-of-year examination, but Units 3 and 4 assume it: the dimensions are used without re-teaching, and the nutrition content underpins the Unit 3 work on dietary guidelines and nutritional imbalance.

Unit 2: Managing health and development (not examined, foundational)

Unit 2 follows a person through change. It covers the developmental transitions from youth to adulthood, physical, social, emotional and intellectual, together with the expectations and responsibilities attached to each, then turns to prenatal and early childhood influences on lifelong health, including maternal health, nutrition and the early years environment. The final strand is practical: youth health literacy, meaning the ability to find, understand and act on health information, and how young people actually access Australia's health system and the services open to them. Like Unit 1 this is not examined at the end of the year, but the health system content connects straight to the Unit 3 material on Medicare, private health insurance and the PBS.