HEALTH PROMOTION
Addressing Health Inequities
Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health. It moves beyond a focus on individual behavior towards a wide range of social and environmental interventions.
It covers a wide range of social and environmental interventions that are designed to benefit and protect individual people’s health and quality of life by addressing and preventing the root causes of ill health, not just focusing on treatment and cure.
Program and strategies should work to improve Greater Englewood
Good Governance
Health promotion requires policy makers across all government departments to make health a central line of government policy and prioritize policies that prevent people from becoming ill and protect them from injuries
Knowledge
People need to acquire the knowledge, skills and information to make healthy choices, they need to have opportunities to make those choices, and they need to be assured of an environment in which they can demand further policy actions to further improve their health.
Healthy Community
The city of Chicago has a key role to play in promoting good health. Strong leadership and commitment at the municipal level is essential to healthy urban planning in order to develop programs that address the root causes of poor health outcomes in the Greater Englewood community.
Health Promotion: An Effective Tool for
Greater Englewood
Excerpts from Health Promotion: An Effective Tool for Global Health by Sanjiv Kumar and GS Preetha. Edited for the Greater Englewood community.
Health promotion is very relevant today. There is a global acceptance that health and social wellbeing are determined by many factors outside the health system which include socioeconomic conditions, patterns of consumption associated with food and communication, demographic patterns, learning environments, family patterns, the cultural and social fabric of societies; sociopolitical and economic changes, including commercialization and trade and global environmental change. In such a situation, health issues can be effectively addressed by adopting a holistic approach by empowering individuals and communities to take action for their health, fostering leadership for public health, promoting intersectoral action to build healthy public policies in all sectors and creating sustainable health systems. Although, not a new concept, health promotion received an impetus following Alma Ata declaration.
There is a high prevalence of tobacco use in Greater Englewood, along with an increase in unhealthy dietary practices and a decrease in physical activity contribute to increases in environmental, behavioral, and biological risk factors, which in turn leads to increase in non-communicable diseases.
Health promotion efforts should be directed toward priority health conditions in Greater Englewood using multiple interventions. This issue-based approach will work best if complemented by settings-based designs. The settings-based designs can be implemented in schools, workplaces, markets, Faith-based organizations, and residential areas to address priority health problems by taking into account the complex health determinants such as behaviors, cultural beliefs, practices, etc. that operate in the places people live and work. Settings-based design also facilitates integration of health promotion actions into the social activities with consideration for existing local situations.