[Measuring the effectiveness of health promotion policy: what can be learnt from Australian success stories?].

In 1987, the Australian state of Victoria has created VicHealth, the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, which has since been quite successful in implementing effective health promotion policies. This paper, after presenting briefly three of these success stories (tobacco control, road trauma decrease and skin cancer prevention), goes on to derive from them the essential steps of successful health promotion interventions. It concludes by reflecting on the nature of the intelligence gathering systems required to anchor good health promotion in good science, and on the barriers to proper measurement that are still pervasive.