Evaluating health impacts: Results from the neighbourhood renewal strategy [corrected] in Victoria, Australia

Aims: Neighbourhood Renewal [NR] Strategy is currently underway in the Victoria's most disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Neighbourhood Renewal utilises an 'area-based' approach to reducing inequalities between NR sites and the Victorian state average across a range of social, educational and health outcomes. We examine the impact of this intervention on health and life satisfaction in the five metropolitan sites involved in first phase of the project.

Design: We employed a before-and-after study design using two cross sectional community surveys to assess changes in health and life satisfaction. The study sample includes people living in NR areas and people living in other areas of the same Local Government Area (LGA). Survey responses from the five metropolitan NR and their surrounding were used in this analysis.

Results: NR residents involved in the program had worse health than people living in the LGA in all analyses. There was no evidence of an NR effect at a whole of area level. However, the health (OR=2.15, 95%CI 1.23-3.74) and life satisfaction (OR=1.79 95%CI 1.38-1.52) of people living in NR areas who participated in the intervention improved relative to people in the LGA.

Conclusions: The results suggest that area-based health interventions are an important tool in the portfolio of strategies to reduce health inequalities.