Men’s Health Initiative

Has the man in your life had a health check-up lately? Whether it’s husband, partner, brother, dad or granddad – we all have a man in our lives that we deeply care about. The latest PA Research Foundation campaign is all about making sure they stay on top of their health. In a fun way.

While women are generally more comfortable talking about their health, men find it more difficult to broach the topic. The Mandate Health Pass campaign is designed to give them a little more incentive to get checked out by a GP.

How does it work? Well, for $10 (all proceeds are given to Men’s Health Research) you can have a Mandate Leave Pass or Passes posted to you. Giving a pass to the man/men in your life encourages them to go see a GP for a checkup and take the rest of the day off to do whatever he likes with his mates. These passes are available for anyone - whether it’s an individual or a business.

The average life expectancy of men (79.5) is significantly younger than women (84). Although there are a number of complex reasons for this, it is believed that lack of awareness, attitude and men’s reluctance to talk about health are contributing factors.

To put it into perspective, here are some stats from the team at Movember:

• Each hour, preventable conditions kill more than 4 men in Australia.
• 1 in 2 Australian men will be diagnosed with cancer by the time they turn 85 (compared to 1 in 3 women).
• More men have diabetes than women.
• On average more men smoke than women.
• The number of male deaths are higher in all age groups.
• There was approximately 19,438 new prostate cancer diognoses in Australia in 2009.

Awareness, education and research are key to improving these statistics and that’s exactly what the Mandate Pass campaign aims to do. It gets the community involved in improving the health of Australian men by encouraging conversation and action.

The team at Matter Solutions love this Mandate Pass idea and we have been working pro bono with the PA Research Foundation to give their initiative a little extra kick. Our role in the campaign is to run their Adwords account. They already have access to Google Funds to run their campaign, so we are helping them optimise it for their fundraising targets.

We wish the PA Research Foundation all the best with the intiative and would like to thank them for the opportunity to be involved in such a great cause. To get involved or find out more information visit the Mandate Health Pass website.