Health Promotion Planning

Hello everybody, my name is Professor Bruce Maycock. I’m a professor at Curtin University and also the secretary-general of APACPH. That’s the Asia-Pacific Academic Consortium for Public Health. I’m also here in Taipei as a member of the Collaborating Centre for Health Promotion. Today, what I’m going to do is a brief introduction to Health Promotion Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation. If you’re new to public health, then I suggest you take a few minutes to watch this video. It provides a number of nice examples of the economic returns that occur when people take up public health activities, such as physical activity.

In this case, if just 10% of the American population began walking, they could save 5.6 billion dollars every year in heart disease, and that’s just one indicator that is impacted by taking up walking. There are also mental health and other benefits that could be derived. It’ll only take you a few minutes, so if you’re new to public health, have a look at this video. This is definition that I’m one of the co-authors of. The definition actually emerged out of practice. You’ll note for those that are familiar with the Ottawa Charter and the WHO definitions of Health Promotion that it contains many of the same elements.

But importantly, it also talks about some of the strategies that we might use to be doing health promotion, and also some of the ways in which we would go about doing it. Over the course of these presentations, I’m going to talk about a health promotion planning cycle. It’s pretty simple, really. It’s just about planning, doing, and evaluating. But you don’t want to think about them all as just standalone individual elements. The trick to doing really good health promotion is to make sure that everything is integrated. One of the tasks that I would be like you to be able to do at the end of this, is to be able to construct a chart like this.

It’s a one-page schematic that contains all of the essential elements in a single document. These include the goal, the health issue, the definition of the target group, the risk factors that you’re trying to address, the objectives, an identification of the strategies that you’ll be using, and also the evaluation methods that are used. Now I’ve mentioned already, the Ottawa Charter, but only in passing. So if you’ve not seen anything about the Ottawa Charter, I strongly recommend that you view this video. It really gives a very nice overview of both health promotion from a WHO perspective and also the Charter. The Ottawa Charter was created in 1986. And it really is a remarkable piece of work.

What it did is it challenged many of the ways in which health promotion professionals and health professionals in general had interacted with their clients or patients. There previously had been a tendency to rule, to blame, and to do what we call “victim blaming”. The tendency had been for the health promotion professionals to dictate what others should be doing. But in actual fact, the Charter challenged a lot of those assumptions. It recognized that there were essential prerequisites for health. Things like food, shelter, peace, income, a stable ecosystem, sustainable resource use, and concepts of social justice and equity, which hadn’t much featured in our activities before.

It championed the concept of participation, that’s the active involvement of people in the planning, the delivery of health services. We see these same concepts been manifest today in co-creation, co-implementation, and co-evaluation. But the genesis actually started with the Ottawa Charter. And the central to the Charter was the concept of equity. For those who recognized that inequity were major source or major factor contributing to health status, and that the very allocation of resources was actually required so that people from poorer groups would have the greatest opportunity to reduce the gap between their health conditions and those that were wealthier in the community.