About the Toolkit 
As a Healthy Lifestyle Worker, your job is to encourage and support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to stay healthy or become healthier. In particular, you will encourage them to eat good food, be physically active, drink alcohol only in moderation - or not at all (pregnant women should not drink at all) - and to quit smoking, or not take it up. This, of course, will help people to live better and longer. The Healthy, Deadly and Strong, Healthy Lifestyle Worker Toolkit (the Toolkit) will assist you in this work.
The Toolkit is a reference and guide for your work as a Healthy Lifestyle Worker. The Toolkit provides information on healthy lifestyles and how you can promote them. It also has background information about some avoidable chronic diseases and ways you can help people to avoid getting them.
Avoidable chronic diseases are the main reason for the large gap in life expectancy between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and non-Indigenous Australians. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are two and a half times more likely to have poor health than non-Indigenous Australians and are more likely to die early from a chronic disease.
It is always better to prevent a disease rather than try to cure it. This is true for chronic diseases too. For example, preventing kidney failure is better than having to move away from family for dialysis. As with kidney failure, many chronic diseases can be prevented if people know what causes them and are helped to make healthy lifestyle choices.
Some lifestyle choices - such as smoking, poor nutrition, lack of physical activity and excessive consumption of alcohol - have a significant impact on the health of individuals and communities as they cause most of the chronic diseases suffered by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Some of these lifestyle choices have become normal over a long period of time and, as a result, may take a while to change. 
To start closing the gap in life expectancy by avoiding chronic disease, a national network of Healthy Lifestyle Workers, Regional Tobacco Coordinators and Tobacco Action Workers is being established. These workers, based with a variety of organisations, will work in regional teams in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia to help people make the right lifestyle choices and reduce their chance of developing an avoidable chronic disease. The Healthy Lifestyle Workers in particular will work with communities in their region to promote and support healthy living through healthy lifestyle information, activities and programs.
This Healthy, Deadly and Strong, Healthy Lifestyle Worker Toolkit has been developed to help Healthy Lifestyle Workers take a community-driven, grass-roots approach in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities develop their own healthy lifestyle activities and chronic disease messages that target the chronic diseases that are a priority in their communities and regions. Other people promoting healthy lifestyles and good health in the community may also find it useful. 
How to use the Toolkit 
The Toolkit is a set of ideas and strategies for you to use in the way that is the most useful to you. The Toolkit will not tell you how to do your job, as every Healthy Lifestyle Worker will have a different job to do. Every community is different and their needs will be different; you will need to work with your communities and understand their needs. It will be your responsibility to stimulate the creation of messages, activities and programs that will encourage the communities to actively improve their lifestyles and to ensure the changes are sustainable.
The Toolkit will give you ideas for your health promotion activities, including some that have been run by other people. It also includes notes on different tasks you will need to do as part of your work, such as how to organise and run meetings and workshops.