Health Promotion Implementation

Now that you have explored the definitions of health promotion, let us take a look at how health promotion can be implemented in practice.

Listen to Pauline talk about the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (1986) and its relevance today.

_{Ottawa Charter emblem (1986) reproduced with permission from WHO http://www.who.int/healthpromotion/conferences/previous/ottawa/en/index4.html}

The Ottawa Charter identifies that health promotion needs to be operationalised through five levels of action:

• Building healthy public policy
• Creating supportive environments
• Developing personal skills
• Strengthening community action including networks
• Reorientation of health services

These levels of action are underpinned by concepts of advocacy, enabling and mediation, and are linked to the WHO definition of health promotion (First International Conference on Health Promotion 1986).

An effective campaign that uses this approach is the youth smoking prevention Truth Initiative in the USA.

Your task

Produce a spider diagram on a health promotion issue related to your area of practice. You could do this using a word processing tool such as Microsoft Word, with a presentation tool such as PowerPoint, or you could draw your diagram by hand, then take a picture of it with your phone.

First, you will need to research a health issue that you could address in your area of practice, eg smoking, drugs, alcohol, adherence to medication, breastfeeding, etc. Then create your spider diagram.

• Place the health issue in the centre of the diagram along with detail on your area of practice.
• This should be surrounded by five boxes, each of which contains one of the five areas of action from the Ottawa Charter:
  1. Building healthy public policy
  2. Creating supportive environments
  3. Developing personal skills
  4. Strengthening community action including networks
  5. Reorientation of health services
• Provide an example in each box of how the health issue could be addressed in your area of practice.
• Assess which of the five areas would be most effective and why.

Post a link to your diagram in the Comments. Please make sure you have set the sharing permissions appropriately.

Helpful reading for the task

_{Hosseinpoor, A. R., Parker, L. A., Tursan d’Espaignet, E., and Chatterji, S. (2012) ‘Socioeconomic Inequality in Smoking in Low-Income and Middle-Income Countries: Results from the World Health Survey’. PLoS ONE. [online] 7 (8), e42843. available from https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042843 [19 June 2018]}

_{Steinberg, M., Williams, J., and Yi, Y. (2015) ‘Poor Mental Health and Reduced Decline in Smoking Prevalence’. American Journal of Preventive Medicine [online] 49 (3), 362-369. available from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4546880/ [19 June 2018]}

_{Truth Initiative (n.d.) Who We Are and What We Do [online] available from https://truthinitiative.org/about-us [4 July 2018]}

_{Tsai, J., and Rosenheck, R. (2012) ‘Smoking Among Chronically Homeless Adults: Prevalence and Correlates’. Psychiatric Services [online] 63 (96), 569-576. available from https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.201100398 [19 June 2018]}

_{WHO (2003) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Geneva: WHO. available from http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/42811/9241591013.pdf [19 June 2018]}

References

_{First International Conference on Health Promotion (1986) ‘Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion’. Health Promotion International. [online] 1 (4). available from https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/1.4.405 [19 June 2018]}

_{WHO (1986) Ottawa Charter emblem [online] available from http://www.who.int/healthpromotion/conferences/previous/ottawa/en/index4.html [16 August 2018]}