Health Promotion Essay

Health promotion is providing individuals with the facilities and information to enable them to make conscious decisions about themselves that will affect their health and wellbeing. The importance of health promotion was established in 1986, this is reflected within ‘The Ottawa Charter’ whereby principles were put into place. The Ottawa Charter highlights that Health Promotion does not solely focus on the medical and physical aspects of health, but that it also involves social aspects beyond the health sector (WHO, 2018).

Health education is a big part of health promotion whereby it is the ability for individuals to understand the importance of their own health and wellbeing. Through learning experiences, consequences from current health

Health education is a distinct part of primary and secondary prevention whereby both individualised and general groups are targeted in hopes to raise awareness whilst understanding the implications of their actions. The health education that is established after tertiary prevention focuses on what lifestyle changes will need to take place in order to aid recovery (Hubley, Copeman & Woodall,

Health education was previously criticised for not enabling equality in health, this led a change in delivery to establish health promotion on a broader scale to ensure equality can be met. The Acheson Report (1998) highlighted social factors leading to inequality and what needed to be established in order to change this, thus underpinning what needs to be achieved from health promotion (Hubley, Copeman & Woodall, 2013).

Public awareness is crucial to ensure that health promotion can be delivered successfully, this can be done in a variety of ways including: social marketing, mass media, community development, two-way communication and national campaigns (Rasheed, Hetherington & Wyatt, 2016). Each of these methods engage in different ways however there is an ethical stigma involved in