What Are Health Promotions?

Health promotion is defined by the World Health Organization as "the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health." Health promotions are generally implemented through policy changes initiated by governments, work sites and public health organizations, and target not only individual behavior, but also the social and environmental factors that shape human well-being.

Background

• The theory behind health promotions is that there are structural factors, such as housing, nutritional availability, income and employment conditions, that affect human health. Whereas a traditional medical approach views health and disease as discrete problems affecting an individual body, health promotion situates illness and wellness in a greater social and environmental context. Health promotion is closely aligned with preventive public health interventions, and both aim to reduce susceptibility to disease, stress and environmental hazards in order to prevent problems from occurring. Because health promotion is identified as an effective and cost-savvy way to decrease public and private health expenditure, government agencies employ this approach widely.

Settings

• Health promotion campaigns take place in a number of settings, including the work place, schools, targeted communities and at-risk social groups. Health promotion has also become a prominent form of international public health interventions, particularly those targeted at maternal and child health and occupational safety. International health promotion is viewed as a cost-effective way of reducing the burden of illness and disease in developing countries by working to change health behaviors before the onset of a particular malady. Promoting condom use and sexual health education, for example, is one common health promotion intervention against the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Methods

• Health promotions have numerous forms, depending on the target audience and the particular health issues being addressed. However, most health promotion efforts have an outreach and educational component, as well as a prescribed policy reform. For example, in encouraging citizens to stop smoking, the New York Department of Health has launched a broad campaign that includes informing smokers about health risks, providing free or affordable resources for quitting, and instituting legal restrictions on the sale of tobacco and places where people can smoke. With the advent of new communication technologies, social marketing now plays a large role in effective health promotion campaigns.

Types of Health Promotions

• While health promotions focus on a wide variety of health topics, they most commonly target broad dimensions of individual and community health. Examples of the issues that health promotions focus on include exercise, healthy diet, smoking cessation, fertility planning, diabetes management and handicap accessibility. Health promotions tend to aim for a wide social impact in order to elevate the public health standing of the greater group, community or region.