Health Promotion

So what is health promotion? Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over and to improve their health. And what we mean by health is, of course, physical health, but it's also mental health and social wellbeing. And so it's not just the simple absence of disease. So there are really two levels at which we need to think about health promotion. First of all, the external determinants of health, the social, economic, and environmental circumstances that people live within. These may facilitate or restrict the range of options that they have and their propensity to make healthy choices. And secondly, in the context of those determinants, we might want to promote certain behaviors that we know will positively impact on the health of individuals. So we're gonna start off by talking about the Ottawa Charter. That was the outcome of the first health promotions conference held in, you guessed it, Ottawa, Canada. And then I'm gonna talk you through an alternative framework and I think that that's gonna help you think about health promotion in a slightly different way. The Ottawa Charter proposes five areas of action for health promotion. Firstly, personal skills. We want to provide information and education that promote healthy choices like education and support for smoking cessation. Next, community action. So community fun runs, for example, or NGOs that provide support to groups that have specific challenges. Next, creating a supportive environment. So for example, cycle lanes and parks that allow people to be more physically active. Then there's healthy public policy. So legislation like seatbelt laws or taxation on tobacco products or regulation around food and water safety. A super quick interruption to this video to say thanks to Nested Knowledge. Nested Knowledge sponsored this channel and I absolutely love them. Nested Knowledge is an online platform that you can use to do literature review and systematic lip review. And what I love about this platform is that I'm using it for the entire process, beginning to end, all the way from search, screening, tagging, extraction, all the way through to actually writing the manuscript, creating a living document online. I've got my entire team using it, so we collaborate, different people doing different parts of the process. I used to hate literature review, now I love it. If you wanna love literature review, check out Nested Knowledge, click on the link in the description below. And without further ado, on with the video. And finally, a reorientation of the health services themselves. So we want increased focus of health services on keeping people healthy through, for example, health educator roles or improved access to services for people living in communities with linguistic challenges. Now, I'd like to propose a slightly different way of thinking about health promotion. The starting point of my framework is to focus on people's freedoms and opportunities and the relationship between these two things. And we'll start off by talking about freedoms. There are parts of the world in which women's rights are restricted, children are forced into child labor, people are enslaved or imprisoned or live under draconian political regimes that don't respect human rights. So before we start talking about the fact that we want people to consume locally produced organic celery, our starting point must be that people are at the very least free to make healthy choices at all. Now, there are free people all over the world that still can't make healthy choices because the options just aren't there. If there's no clean water to drink, then you can't choose to drink clean water. So before we start talking about personal choice, we have to first deal with these environmental enablers, freedoms and opportunities, before we start talking about behavior change. Next is information, knowledge and understanding. So that at the very least, a person has the option of making an informed decision one way or the next. And finally, we need to incentivize behavior change. We need to make it easy for people to make healthy choices. We need to use our understanding of behavioral economics to increase the chances that healthy choices will be made by individuals. So these last two are really about personal choice and behavior change, but they can only come off the back of freedoms and opportunities. Thanks for watching. I hope you found this useful. Please stay and watch another video.