1 Definition of health promotion
Health promotion seeks ways to educate people about behaviours that will maximise their health. A guiding principle of health promotion is to prevent poor-health or diseases from occurring. Good levels of health can be achieved by avoiding some of the factors that can contribute to diseases occurring. Health promotion is defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as 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 (2021).
Therefore, health promotion is the process of adopting behaviours and a lifestyle that helps to prevent some of the illnesses that can cause poor health from occurring. In England, the Department of Health and Social Care published the Prevention is better than cure document in November 2018, which outlines the government’s vision of investing in the prevention of illnesses occurring, rather than spending on curing illnesses. The Secretary for State outlines the government’s vision of how ‘prevention creates the right conditions for good health and wellbeing – helping everyone to live well for longer’ (2018, p. 5). Within the document, the features of prevention are described as:
- Prevention creates the right conditions for good health and wellbeing.
- Prevention is about helping people stay healthy, happy and independent for as long as possible. This objective is as relevant at seventy years old as it is at age seven.
- Prevention means stopping problems from arising in the first place.
- This means giving people the skills, knowledge and confidence to take full control of their lives and their health and social care and making healthy choices as easy as possible.
Clearly, this approach raises considerations when applied to health promotion in very young children and some of these considerations will be discussed in the following sections.
Activity 1 The benefits of health promotion
Before you read on, take 10 minutes to think about what you think the benefits are of health promotion to individuals and to society, that is the different ‘stakeholders’. Use the table below to make notes of your responses:
| List of stakeholders | Benefit to each stakeholder |
|---|---|
| Each child | |
| All children | |
| Parents and family | |
| Adults | |
| Society | |
| Early Childhood Education and Care settings and schools | |
| Any other stakeholders you can think of? |
As you read the following section, consider your responses and compare them with the points made about how promoting children’s health has benefits for many stakeholders.