• Health promotion

Health promotion

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. The authors recommend to:

• maintain current interventions and acknowledge future issues to be addressed that will help to tackle a more comprehensive set of health issues
• create an evaluation framework and have an ongoing evaluation process from the start 
• collect and record baseline data before introducing the programme in subsequent villages.

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