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Health Promotion for Overcoming Diversity and Inclusiveness Challenges

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Hello, my name is Masamine Jimba, Professor at the University of Tokyo and I’m teaching Community Health and Global Health in the Graduate School of Medicine. I’m also President of the Asia Pacific Consortium for Public Health and a member of the Collaborating Center for Health Promotion, CCHP. The topic for today is health promotion for overcoming diversity and inclusiveness challenges. Before going to specific contents, I’d like to share with you some key aspects of health promotion, which may be related with today’s topic. This slide shows today’s contents and the first point is health promotion in general. Everybody must know this definition of health by WHO.
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As you can see from this slide, it consists of two parts: and the first part is closely linked with the host promotion. Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being. In the second part is related with disease prevention. Breslow once explained in the difference between disease prevention and health promotion. Both share similar characteristics and interventions are also sometimes similar. However, according to Breslow, as you can see from this slide, the major objective of disease prevention is the absence of disease, and not more than that. On the other hand, health promotion goes beyond the absence of disease. Sometimes we consider to meet life’s challenge as a goal of health promotion.
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WHO defines health promotion as the process of enabling people to control over and improve their health. It does not say controlling over health is people’s own responsibility. It does not say improving their health is people’s responsibility. It is saying that the process of enabling them is important. Or we may understand it as creating environment for them to become healthy is a key to health promotion. For this, WHO showed five strategies for health promotion. Build health public policy, create supportive environment, strengthen community action, develop personal skills, and reorient health services. Out of five, what seems to be more important? It’s the first two build healthy public policy and create supportive environment.
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We may understand importance of these two strategies by looking at these two figures. If you look at the left one, it shows the characteristics of typical health education. Suppose a person is trying to stop smoking. A health educator may directly approach him and give him knowledge, such as smoking is bad for health, or smoking is a cause of lung cancer. But many people cannot follow such advices. Then, if you look at the right figure, you will know the slope is less sharp ,and a smoker can easily move to other health status. This is because health promotion approach uses strategies to improve public policy and create supportive environment.
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For example, a policy to increase tobacco tax is very effective for smokers to stop smoking. Also, smoke-free environment is effective. Then, health education can be easily implemented to help the person to move toward the healthy condition.

Dr. Jimba will explain the main difference between disease prevention and health promotion in this video.

He starts with the definition of each term. The goal of disease prevention is the absence of disease. The goal of health promotion is for well-being. Next, he will mention Ottawa Charter 5 Strategies for health promotion mentioned by Dr. Bruce at the beginning of this course. The Ottawa Charter was crucial in revolutionizing HP, it will be greatly beneficial for you to familiarize yourself with its core strategies. For this section, Dr. Jimba would like to emphasize 2 of the 5 strategies: Building healthy public policies and Creating supportive environments.

Dr. Jimba used anti-smoking efforts as an example to explain how tobacco tax and no-smoking environments can complement health education.

Could you think of other anti-smoking strategies involving policymaking or environmental modification? Have you ever heard of other HP campaigns that utilized the above strategies? If you would like to share your thoughts please leave a comment in the comments section.

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Capacity Building: Core Competencies for Health Promotion

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