Health promotion

Health promotion is, as stated in the 1986 World Health Organization (WHO) Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, 'the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health. To reach a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, an individual or group must be able to identify and to realize aspirations, to satisfy needs, and to change or cope with the environment. Health is, therefore, seen as a resource for everyday life, not the objective of living. Health is a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources, as well as physical capacities. Therefore, health promotion is not just the responsibility of the health sector, but goes beyond healthy life-styles to well-being'. Health promotion is, as stated in the 1986 World Health Organization (WHO) Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, 'the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health. To reach a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, an individual or group must be able to identify and to realize aspirations, to satisfy needs, and to change or cope with the environment. Health is, therefore, seen as a resource for everyday life, not the objective of living. Health is a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources, as well as physical capacities. Therefore, health promotion is not just the responsibility of the health sector, but goes beyond healthy life-styles to well-being'. The WHO's 2005 Bangkok Charter for Health Promotion in a Globalized World defines health promotion as 'the process of enabling people to increase control over their health and its determinants, and thereby improve their health'. Health promotion involves public policy that addresses health determinants such as income, housing, food security, employment, and quality working conditions. More recent work has used the term Health in All Policies to refer to the actions that incorporate health into all public policies. Health promotion is aligned with health equity and can be a focus of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) dedicated to social justice or human rights. Health literacy can be developed in schools, while aspects of health promotion such as breastfeeding promotion can depend on laws and rules of public spaces. One of the Ottawa Charter Health Promotion Action items is infusing prevention into all sectors of society, to that end, it is seen in preventative healthcare rather than a treatment and curative care focused medical model. There is a tendency among some public health officials, governments, and the medical industrial complex to reduce health promotion to just developing personal skill also known as health education and social marketing focused on changing behavioral risk factors. This first publication of health promotion is from the 1974 Lalonde report from the Government of Canada, which contained a health promotion strategy 'aimed at informing, influencing and assisting both individuals and organizations so that they will accept more responsibility and be more active in matters affecting mental and physical health'. Another predecessor of the definition was the 1979 Healthy People report of the Surgeon General of the United States, which noted that health promotion 'seeks the development of community and individual measures which can help... to develop lifestyles that can maintain and enhance the state of well-being'. At least two publications led to a 'broad empowerment/environmental' definition of health promotion in the mid-1980s: The 'American' definition of health promotion, first promulgated by the American Journal of Health Promotion in the late 1980s, focuses more on the delivery of services with a bio-behavioral approach rather than environmental support using a settings approach. Later the power on the environment over behavior was incorporated.