What is health promotion?
 
 
Health promotion is the process of enabling people to exert control over the determinants of health and thereby improve their health. As a concept and set of practical strategies it remains an essential guide in addressing the major health challenges faced by developing and developed nations, including communicable and non-communicable diseases, and issues related to human development and health.
Health promotion is a process directed towards enabling people to take action. Thus, health promotion is not something that is done on or to people; it is done by, with and for people either as individuals or as groups. The purpose of this activity is to strengthen the skills and capabilities of individuals to take action and the capacity of groups or communities to act collectively to exert control over the determinants of health and achieve positive change.
Role and relevance of health promotion
In tackling the determinants of health, health promotion will include combinations of the strategies first described in the Ottawa charter, namely developing personal skills, strengthening community action, and creating supportive environments for health, backed by healthy public policy. Special attention is also given to the need to reorient health services towards health promotion.
Thus, health promotion will include actions directed at both the determinants of health that are outside the immediate control of individuals, including social, economic and environmental conditions, and the determinants within the more immediate control of individuals, including individual health behaviours.
Health promotion is a powerfully relevant strategy for social development -
in particular as an important set of strategies to address the factors influencing inequalities in health. Health promotion also encompasses the principles that underlie a series of strategies that seek to foster conditions that allow populations to be healthy and to make healthy choices. The range of strategies draws upon multiple fields of thought including anthropology, epidemiology, sociology, psychology and other behavioural sciences, public health, political science, education and communication, to name a few, and their respective methodologies.
 
www.healthpromotionagency.org.uk