World Health Day on 7th April is a good prompt to look at what really shapes health in our communities. Across communities we talk a lot about hospitals, wait lists, and access to services, and those things matter.
But it’s fair to say that health is shaped long before someone walks into a clinic.
It’s shaped by the conditions of day-to-day life: whether you have stable housing, whether you can afford essentials, whether you feel connected to others, and whether you have a reason to get up each morning with purpose.
And that’s where employment becomes part of the health conversation.
Employment is about more than just a job
Employment is one of those topics that brings up a range of emotions. We hear plenty from the media: skills shortages, job security, and the ongoing push and pull between wages, conditions and productivity.
While it’s easy to reduce employment to numbers, what’s often forgotten is the role it plays beyond delivering a pay packet.
There’s no doubt there’s a strong correlation between employment and your personal circumstances. Yes, wages matter, but the reality is that it goes far deeper than that.
Being employed can change someone’s life. It adds to feelings of self-worth and the ability to contribute back to the community. It provides purpose, a reason to contribute day to day, and that feeling of self-worth is crucial when you think about the wider knock-on effects of unemployment.
The community impact of unemployment is real - and it’s often worse in regional areas
Unemployment, by its nature, can be a difficult subject to discuss because there are many underlying causes. But unemployment - especially long-term unemployment - is sadly tied to a range of community issues.
We know communities with higher unemployment can struggle across many measures: from business investment to broader social consequences. And there’s also an impact on the mental wellbeing of the community.
While these impacts are felt everywhere, there’s no doubt they’re often worse in regional areas. Labour markets are thinner, unemployment can run higher, and there are simply fewer local opportunities to keep people in the area - which is why the ripple effects can spread faster and hit harder.
Financial wellbeing is health, and ignoring it is costly
World Health Day in April is also a reminder that you can’t talk about health without talking about financial pressure.
When household budgets are stretched, people don’t just “feel stressed”. Practical decisions change. People delay care. They avoid preventative appointments. They take on debt just to keep up. Small problems become bigger problems.
In our work at VERTO bringing skills, employment and support together, we see the way housing stress and financial stress quickly become health stress, and once that cycle starts, it can be difficult to stop.
In an earlier piece on the housing crisis, I’ve discussed how housing instability can disrupt every aspect of daily life - from maintaining employment to managing health and personal relationships - and how it can become a vicious, fast-moving spiral.
This is exactly why practical budgeting and debt support aren’t ‘nice extras’. In my experience, the solutions that stick are the practical ones: stable pathways into work, skills that match local jobs, tenancy support when housing becomes shaky, and financial counselling when the numbers stop adding up.
Finding the solution: it’s rarely one lever
It would be nice if employment outcomes were achieved through a single intervention. But in the real world, they rarely are.
That’s why we’ve deliberately shaped a more integrated, wraparound model at VERTO, because the reality is that people’s lives don’t come in neat categories.
Over time, we’ve integrated job services, vocational training, apprenticeships, mental health support, tenancy advocacy and financial counselling, so that support can be coordinated and people aren’t left navigating a maze on their own.
And that matters, because sustainable employment is rarely built on skills alone. If the foundations aren’t stable, even the best job outcome can be short-lived.
Employers are not bystanders in this story
There’s no doubt government has a role to play. But it’s not just a government challenge.
I’ve long believed there’s a role for business to play too, particularly when it comes to employing and training people and investing back into the communities that support them, especially in regional Australia.
Many employers want to grow. Many want to hire. But skills shortages show up differently outside cities, and the “perfect candidate” isn’t always sitting there ready to go.
That’s why the focus needs to shift from simply filling vacancies to building pathways: apprenticeships, traineeships, reskilling, and practical partnerships between employers, training providers and community services - because prevention is always better, and often cheaper, than a cure.
The bottom line
In the end, employment contributes to what kind of community we live in. We should never forget that community and employment go hand in hand.
And on World Health Day, it’s worth saying clearly:
Secure employment is one of the strongest social determinants of health because it supports stability, purpose, connection and financial wellbeing.
If we can deliver the right opportunities with the right support, then individuals benefit, families stabilise, employers build stronger workforces, and communities are stronger as a result.
