Our lifestyle

A cornerstone of health promotion and disease prevention is ensuring healthy environments and supporting healthy lifestyles. Prevention efforts occur across a continuum:

• Primordial prevention targets sociocultural conditions to avoid a risk factor from developing.
• Primary prevention focuses on modifying existing risk factors to prevent disease.
• Secondary prevention is based on early detection and intervention to improve outcomes.
• Tertiary prevention reduces the severity of existing disease, avoids further complications, or prevents other health conditions from developing.

This section focuses on:

• Smoking
• Physical activity
• Electronic cigarettes
• Sun safety
• Weight
• Immunisations
• Diet
• Environmental health
• Alcohol
• Population screening
• Illicit drugs
• Family and domestic and sexual violence

For each risk factor, the impact on disease burden is summarised. More information about the relationship between risk factors and health burden is in the Burden of Disease section of this report.

Valuing prevention

Improving modifiable risk factors benefits health and wellbeing and plays a role in healthcare sustainability. Nationally, over a third (35.8%) of the total health burden was attributable to risk factors in 2024.¹

Public health intervention cost-effectiveness evidence is growing—in the UK, 75% of public health interventions from 2005 to 2018 were cost-effective.² In addition to the return on the original investment, a $1 investment in public health generates $14 in return back to the wider health and social economy.³ In Queensland, however, 2.1% of total healthcare expenditure was spent on public health in 2022–23, up from an average of 1.1% (constant prices) in the decade since 2012–13.⁴