Health promotion

Health promotion is "the process of enabling people to increase control over their health and its determinants, and thereby improve their health", according to the World Health Organization's (WHO) 2005 Bangkok Charter for Health Promotion in a Globalized World.

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 to incorporate health into all public policies. Health promotion is aligned with health equity and can be a focus of 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. Health promotion is focused on preventative healthcare rather than a medical model of curative care.

There is a tendency among public health officials and governments—and this is especially the case in neoliberal nations such as Canada and the USA—to reduce health promotion to health education and social marketing focused on changing behavioral risk factors.

The "first and best known" definition of health promotion, promulgated by the American Journal of Health Promotion since at least year 1986, is "the science and art of helping people change their lifestyle to move toward a state of optimal health". This definition was derived from the 1974 Lalonde report from the Government of Canada,<refcap name=Minkler1989/> 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... [people] to develop lifestyles that can maintain and enhance the state of well-being".

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