What is Health Promotion?

Health Promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over and improve their health.

Health promotion is guided by the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, actions and strategies that guide practice worldwide. These actions include: building healthy public policy, creating supportive environments, strengthening community action, developing personal skills, and reorienting health services. The strategies for these actions are: to enable, advocate, and mediate.

Health promotion activities often include:

• public awareness and education campaigns to raise awareness and educate the public on public health topics, with a goal to having the public consider their lifestyle and potentially change their behaviour; 
• engaging and supporting community members and organizations to take action on health, through building partnerships and empowering communities to set priorities, make decisions, and implement strategies that achieve better health for their communities and residents; and 
• implementing programs and interventions that consider the whole population by ensuring they are universal, accessible, and support healthy lifestyle choices by making the healthy choice, the easy choice. 

Health Promotion promotes and encourages good health and wellbeing for the whole population.