Health promotion
- Evaluation of the healthy village program in Kapit District, Sarawak, Malaysia
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This research article, published in the Health Promotion International journal, evaluates the World Health Organization’s Healthy Village programme. It reports on physical and behavioural changes resulting from the programme. The findings are from 12 longhouses (10 of which participate in the programme). The participating villages demonstrated several positive changes across all programme focus areas: smoking, exercise habits and health screening, fire safety, environmental hygiene and village beautification, and food preparation and hygiene. This was not the case with the two non-participating longhouses.
The article concludes that the programme is widely accepted as a way to empower longhouse populations to take control of their own health and the factors contributing to it. Village culture, social structure and the housing system are maintained, and better village–government relations are formed. The article argues it is possible to make the Healthy Village programme a sustainable and widespread intervention. It aims to inspire other longhouses in the district to follow suit.
Health promotion as a process is concerned with positive health and well-being; it adopts a holistic concept of health that relates to lifestyles and living conditions. It seeks to strengthen individual skills and capabilities and the capacity of communities themselves to act collectively to tackle the factors that affect their health.
In 1986 the first International Conference on Health Promotion was held in Ottawa, Canada. A key milestone for the health promotion movement emerged from this conference with the adoption of the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion. The charter builds on the progress made at Alma-Ata and calls for action in achieving the global strategy ‘Health for All’ by the year 2000 and beyond. It also formally recognises that health services should incorporate health promotion concepts such as community development, empowerment and advocacy.
An increasing amount of research places social factors including poverty at the root of the growing inequalities in health. However, in many low income countries there is a lack of resources and capacity to move from a disease focus in order to tackle these underlying determinants of health. They are also increasingly facing the same challenges from chronic diseases that developed countries face.
Effective health promotion is carried out by addressing individual risk factors for specific health outcomes (e.g. poor nutrition, physical inactivity, substance abuse) together with addressing the underlying societal determinants (e.g. poverty, inequality and socioeconomic-related factors). Health promotion interventions include actions to improve health by changing health damaging behaviours, such as substance abuse and unsafe sex, as well as facilitating screening, education, environmental health and clean sanitation, and other aspects of healthy public policy.
Recommended reading
- Shaping the future of health promotion: priorities for action
- ( A. Scriven / International Union for Health Promotion and Education , 2007)
- This document, written by the International Union for Health Promotion and Education, highlights their priorities and recommendations for future action in health promotion. Their aim is to aid health ...
- Promoting mental health: concepts, emerging evidence, practice: report of the World Health Organization
- ( H. Herrman;S. Saxena;R. Moodie / Department of Mental Health and Substance Dependence, WHO , 2005)
- This book by the World Health Organization’s Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse describes the concept of mental health promotion, the emerging evidence for effective mental health p...
Latest Additions
- Physical and sexual violence is associated with multiple adverse health behaviours
- ( D. W. Brown;L. Riley;A. Butchart / Bulletin of the World Health Organization : the International Journal of Public Health , 2009)
- This article, published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, examines associations between exposure to physical violence (PV) or sexual violence (SV) and adverse health behaviours among a...
- How to include the perspectives of persons with disabilities in the project cycle management
- ( C. Naughton / Make Development Inclusive: mainstreaming disability in development cooperation , 2008)
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Although one in five of the world’s poorest people are disabled, disability itself has not been included in world leaders’ plans to meet the millennium development goals. This manual is...
