HEALTH PROMOTION

Health Promotion



Health Promotion

Introduction

Health promotion can be explicated as a process of assisting individuals to augment the control of their health. It aims at to improve the quality of life through involvement in physically, socially, and spiritually fulfilling life (Edelman & Mandle, 2006). The health promotion plays a vital role in assisting the individual's sociological, educational, and psychological life.

A key issue in defining health promotion is whether it is viewed as an umbrella term, covering a range of disciplines committed to improving the health of the population, or as a discipline in its own right. Recent changes in the knowledge base and the practice of health promotion are characteristic of paradigmatic and disciplinary development. They take a discipline to involve an ordered field of study embracing associated theories, perspectives and methods. A discipline would be expected to have its own ideology that would also inform standards of professional practice.

Analysis of Health Promotion Issues

At a more fundamental level, it is noted that health promotion is struggling to remain true to the ideals set out in the Ottawa Charter and maintain its focus on tackling the social determinants of health. This is attributed to current neoliberal political climates which favour individualistic lifestyle approaches rather than efforts to address social determinants of health (Gorin, 2006). There is increasing concern in some parts of the world that the discourse of health promotion is being obscured and replaced — for example in England by 'health improvement' and in Canada by 'population health'. What is all the more surprising is that this is happening in countries which have, historically been at the forefront of the development of health promotion. Tackling complex public health problems requires a multidisciplinary response. We see health promotion as having an essential and pivotal role in orchestrating that response. However, it is to make a significant contribution to tackling contemporary health issues, it needs to re-engage with its radical agenda and a researcher described that there are four tasks of medicine are promotion of health, prevention of illness, restoration and rehabilitation of the sick. It was not until the late 1970s that this term began to be applied in a more specific way to a concept, movement, and discipline and, indeed profession. It has been noted that the roots of contemporary health promotion are in health education.

Two broad paths can be traced in the subsequent development of health education. First, the preventive approach, sought even more sophisticated ways of achieving behaviour change by means of the application of psychological theory. Second, the educational approach, was more in tune with progressive educational philosophy, was concerned with enabling people to make informed choices. The emergence of health promotion was in response to the need to address the environmental as well as, the behavioural determinants of health. In effect, a shift was marked that was concerned with healthy choices to make the healthy choice the easy choice (Maville, 2008).

Health promotion includes efforts to tackle the social and environmental determinants of health by means of healthy ...