promoting health

The first 200 words of this essay...

Promoting Health

(The British Heart Foundation's contribution to public health)

By Louise Smith

What is health promotion? The term health promotion is used in a number of different ways. According to Naidoo and Wills (2000) these different understandings of the definition of health promotion are as follows; sick salesmanship of health, attempts to persuade an individual to change their lifestyle, a combination of organisational interventions designed to prevent disease, and, an approach and philosophy of care that encourages everyone to value independence and be aware of different factors and individual choice.

Indeed health promotion derives from the concept of health education and the dominant factor is that to be healthy means to be absent from disease, and therefore to be able to promote good health, information of what illness etc is, should be made available to the public.

This was introduced in 1848 when the Public Health Legislation saw the appointment of Medical Officers of Health, to distribute information to the public, in order to safeguard the public against certain threatening diseases such as small pox, typhoid etc, as these diseases were rife in this era. Over the next decade the