Health Promotion

What is Health Promotion?

  • Health promotion is about educating and informing individuals and communities on how to improve health and wellbeing.
  • It emphasizes prevention, not just treatment, and empowers people to take control of their own health.

Aims of Health Promotion

  • To increase control over and improve individuals’ health.
  • To reduce health inequalities among different groups in society.
  • It encourages healthier behaviours and lifestyles.
  • It aims to enable environments that support good health.

Techniques for Health Promotion

  • Educational methods: This involves sharing information about the risks and effects of unhealthy behaviours and providing advice for change.
  • Behaviour change techniques: Like goal setting, self-monitoring, feedback, and reinforcement strategies are used to help change unhealthy behaviours.
  • Environmental changes: By changing environments to make healthy choices easier, we facilitate better health decisions. This can include improving access to safe water, sanitation, adequate housing and nutritious food.

Types of Health Promotion Initiative

  • Preventing disease before it starts to reduce health risks (e.g. anti-smoking campaigns).
  • Ensuring good health services and timely access to preventive care.
  • Empowering communities to take control over their health, for example by promoting exercise and healthy eating.

Health Promotion Agencies

  • Various agencies are involved in health promotion including government departments, NGOs, and health service providers.
  • The World Health Organisation (WHO) in particular plays a leading role in global health promotion.

Evaluating Health Promotion

  • Evaluation involves the systematic assessment of the design, implementation, cost, and outcomes of health promotion interventions.
  • It can be used to improve programmes, provide accountability, and contribute to knowledge about health promotion effectiveness.

The Health Belief Model

  • The Health Belief Model is a psychological model that tries to explain and predict health behaviours, specifically the uptake of health services.
  • The model focuses on the attitudes and beliefs of individuals, suggesting that health behaviour is determined by personal beliefs or perceptions about a disease and the strategies available to decrease its occurrence.

Remember, health promotion is an essential part of public health and is intricately linked to health education. Its aim is to positively influence health behaviours and increase quality of life.