Global trend of health promotion

Health is now regarded as a common good which has to be pursued by the cooperation among various sectors in our societies. In order to promote a public health in an efficient way, it is necessary to establish a new health care paradigm. Health care system which is not depending solely on the health professionals but led by communities or general public will be more effective and efficient. We can find demands for the new approach of health care paradigm in various areas. In the Ottawa Charter, health promotion is defined as a process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health (WHO, 1996). In this charter, health is not regarded as an issue which can be addressed in the individual level, but it is considered from the macro perspective of view, which can be achieved by the support of the social system. Effective public health policies, creating supportive environments for health, building up community action for health or re-orient health services can be the examples of social supports that enable societies to achieve public health. Health promotion is closely related to the reinforcement of the community capacity. WHO has emphasized that community empowerment is an important means for achieving health promotion. Community capacity is a notion that includes community members’ abilities, community members’ participation in solving community problems, capacity of the regional society organizations and network between regional society organizations (Glanz, Rimer, & Viswanath, 2008). Therefore, community empowerment means that improvement of the community organizations capacity, vitalization of community members’ participation in solving community problems and vitalization of the network between organizations in communities. England is a good example where solving health care problems through a community empowerment. Health Action Zone is a community-based health equality improvement business which was started by England’s labor party. It began in 15 areas in 1998 and its objective was to build a partnership between the government, public institutions, communities, consumers and corporations for the improvement of the health care services. The business was evaluated successful in the sense that it contributed to construct a strong relationship among those sectors (Judge & Bauld, 2006). With a collaboration of a department of health and human services(HHS) and centers for disease control and prevention(CDC), Steps to a healthierUS program has been operated in the US since 2003. In this program, community consortiums are organized in order for community partners to participate in a planning, execution and evaluation of the health promotion business. In addition, in order to discuss efficient strategies and barriers of the business, roundtable discussion, which is a stakeholders’ meeting, has been held in a regular basis (Department of Health and Human Services, 2004). There is a mutual relationship between community empowerment and network vitalization. Therefore, it would be efficient to reinforce an overall community capacity by establishing network-facilitating policies. Furthermore, sharing health related issues through an intersectoral collaboration will help to achieve a sustainable health promotion in our societies.

 

 

1) Department of Health and Human Services, US, 2004. Steps to a Healthier US :Cooperative Agreement Program. 2004. [On-line] Retrieved from http://www.healthierus.gov/steps/grantees/2004/StepsCoopAgrmn.pdf

 

2) Judge K, Bauld L(2006). Learning from Policy Failure? Health Action Zones in England. European Journal of Public Health, 16(4), 341–3443)

3) Glanz, K., Rimer, B. K., & Viswanath, K. (Eds.). (2008). Health behavior and health education: theory, research, and practice. John Wiley & Sons.