Healthy Ireland

Healthy Ireland focuses on improving people's health and wellbeing. Its goal is to prevent chronic disease by encouraging healthy lifestyle behaviours and creating healthier environments.

There are 4 central goals in Healthy Ireland.

These include:

• increasing the amount of people who are healthy
• reducing health inequalities
• protecting the public from threats to health and wellbeing
• creating an environment where every individual and sector can play their part in achieving a healthy Ireland

Healthy Ireland in the HSE

Since 2015, the HSE have been working to implement the Healthy Ireland vision across the health services ensuring that everyone can enjoy physical and mental health and wellbeing to their full potential.

It aims to:

• enable individuals to live longer, healthier lives
• support people to self-manage and live well with their chronic health conditions
• support the development of healthy environments that help people and staff to adopt healthy behaviours

HSE Health and Wellbeing National Policy Priority Programmes and associated workstreams provide expertise, strategic advice and direction on healthy lifestyle behaviours.

National Policy Priority Programmes

Healthy Ireland implementation plans

HSE works at implementing the Healthy Ireland vision across the health services.

Our goal is to make sure that everyone can achieve their best possible physical and mental health and wellbeing.

The Healthy Ireland Implementation Plan 2023-2027 aims to:

• improve healthy behaviours and prevent chronic disease
• help people manage chronic conditions
• create environments that make the healthy choice the easier choice

As part of the HSE's Healthy Ireland Implementation plan, every Community Healthcare Organisation and Hospital Group had to create their own implementation plan. These plans had to meet the health needs of the people in their area.

This showed commitment to the goal of making Ireland healthier by working together across different government areas.

Healthy Ireland implementation plans.

Healthy Ireland work streams

HSE Healthy Ireland programme oversees a number of work streams. These are listed below.

Arts and Health

Art plays an important role in healthcare. It improves both patient care and staff wellbeing and strengthens community engagement.

Healthy Ireland, the Arts Council, Creative Ireland and Healthy Ireland in the Department of Health are delivering evidence based projects to integrate art into healthcare. 

External partners

The HSE National Healthy Ireland team works with external partners to improve their work.

Some of them are:

• government departments
• Healthy City and County plans         
• local community and development committees
• local economic community plans
• Healthy Ireland @ Your Library, Age Friendly Ireland, Dementia Understand Together Campaign

Healthy Ireland External Partners

Staff personal Health and Wellbeing

The HSE Staff Health and Wellbeing programme aims to improve staff health and wellbeing.

This programme provides resources and national initiatives for both managers and staff.

Staff Health and Wellbeing programme

Order or download health promotion brochures and leaflets from Health Promotion.