Health Promotion Model Analysis

Summary: Models and Approaches to Health Promotion “Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health. It moves beyond a focus on individual behaviour towards a wide range of social and environmental interventions.” (World Health Organisation 2014) “The diversity in concepts of health, influences on health and ways of measuring health lead, to a number of different approaches to health promotion”. This chapter examines five different approaches to health promotion. The medical approach, behavioural change approach, educational approach, empowerment approach and the social change approach. They each differ in the aims, methods and the way they are evaluated. They also have different assumptions

The different approaches to health promotion are descriptive. “It is possible to move in and out of different approaches.”(Naidoo & Wills 2009,p75). It does not describe why one approach would be used in preference to another. “A more analytical means of identifying types of health promotion is to develop models of practice.” (Naidoo & Wills 2009,pg 75). Models offer a theoretical framework for health promotion which give meaning to how the approaches are constructed and offers a simplified approach to how things connect. Theory is defined as how the knowledge is systematically organized which is then used to “explain the nature or behaviour of a specified set of phenomena that can be used as the basis for action” ( Van Ryn & Heany 1992 cited in Naidoo & Wills, p75 ) . Models of health promotion may help to map a field of health promotion, interrogate and analyse already existing practice and to be used to plan and target the possibilities for interventions.” Using a model can be helpful because it encourages you to think theoretically and to improve ways of working” or