Health promotion has been defined by the
World Health Organization's (WHO) 2005
Bangkok Charter for Health Promotion in a Globalized World as "the process of enabling people to increase control over their
health and its determinants, and thereby improve their health".
[1] The primary means of health promotion occur through developing healthy
public policy that addresses the prerequisites of health such as income, housing, food security, employment, and quality working conditions. More recent work has used the term
Health in All Policies to refer to the actions to incorporate health into all public policies. There is a tendency among
public health officials and governments—and this is especially the case in neoliberal nations such as Canada and the USA—to reduce health promotion to health education and
social marketing focused on changing behavioral risk factors.
Recent work in the UK
(Delphi consultation exercise due to be published late 2009 by Royal Society of Public Health and the National Social Marketing Centre) on relationship between health promotion and social marketing has highlighted and reinforce the potential integrative nature of the approaches. While an independent review (NCC 'It's Our Health!' 2006) identified that some social marketing has in past adopted a narrow or limited approach, the UK has increasingly taken a lead in the discussion and developed a much more integrative and strategic approach
[3] which adopts a holistic approach, integrating the learning from effective health promotion approaches with relevant learning from social marketing and other disciplines. A key finding from the Delphi consultation was the need to avoid unnecessary and arbitrary 'methods wars' and instead focus on the issue of 'utility' and harnessing the potential of learning from multiple disciplines and sources. Such an approach is arguably how health promotion has developed over the years pulling in learning from different sectors and disciplines to enhance and develop.
