What is Health Promotion?

• Health promotion is about raising the health status of individuals and communities.

• Promotion in the health context means improving, advancing, supporting, encouraging and
placing health higher on personal and public agendas.

There are a lot of ways in defining health promotion. Tones (1985) defined health promotion as
any intervention designed to foster health. Pender and colleagues (2002) defined health
promotion as “increasing the level of well-being and self-actualization of a given individual or
group”. Others have defined health promotion as lifestyle coaching designed to promote optimal
health, quality of life, and well-being.

• Given that major socioeconomic determinants of health are often outside individual or even
collective control, a fundamental aspect of health promotion is that it aims to empower people to
have more control over aspects of their lives that affect their health.

Socioeconomic determinants of health- are the economic, social, cultural, and political conditions
in which people are born, grow, and live that affect health status.

Everyone’s health is influenced of their family situation, their community, the environment, and
the political climate in which they live. In fact, socioeconomic factors often have a larger impact
on a person’s health than their individual health maintenance behaviors.

Health Promotion Includes:

 Health education

- Is an integral part and essential part of health promotion. Giving of information, teaching
individuals and community on how to achieve better health. It seeks to motivate
individuals to accept a process of behavioral change through directly influencing their
values, beliefs and attitudes.

 Identification and reduction of health risks

- Identify the strengths and past successes that individuals and communities have had in
improving their health. Disease prevention promotion focuses on specific efforts aimed at
reducing the development and severity of chronic diseases and other morbidities.

 Empowerment and Advocacy

- Advocacy for Health is a combination of individual and social actions designed to gain
political commitment, policy support, social acceptance and systems support for a
particular health goal or programme. Advocacy is one of the three major strategies for
health promotion and can take many forms including the use of the mass media and
multi-media, direct political lobbying, and community mobilization through, for example,
coalitions of interest around defined issues.
  Health Policy Development
- Making systematic changes – through improved laws, rules, and regulations (policy),
functional organizational components (systems), and economic, social, or physical
environment – to encourage, make available, and enable healthy choices.

It is about seeing the implications for health in policies about, for example, equal opportunities, housing,
employment, transport and leisure.

Health Promotion can do the ff:

 Increase our understanding of health issues

 Increase our responsibility for own health
 Decrease risk of diseases
 Improve quality of life: provide ways to tackle problems such as weight
 Increase life expectancy: for example, informing people on safe levels of alcohol
 Change people’s personal behavior and lifestyle choices as simple as washing our hands.

Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion

• Organized by WHO. is the name of an international agreement signed at the First

International Conference on Health Promotion at Ottawa, Canada in November 1986.

It launched a series of actions among international organizations, national governments and

local communities to achieve the goal of "Health For All" by the year 2000 and beyond through
better health promotion.