Order Description
The World Health Organization’s Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (1986) sets out a vision for integrated health promotion. (Attachment 1). It proposes that five action areas and three strategies are useful for bringing about change to people, structures and environments, and in turn, health:
Action areas:
1. Build Healthy Public Policy
2. Create Supportive Environments
3. Strengthen Community Actions
4. Develop Personal Skills
5. Reorient Health Services
Strategies:
1. Enabling
2. Mediating
3. Advocating
The Victorian Department of Health (2008) identified seven guiding principles for its work in integrated health promotion. These drew on the action areas and strategies of the Ottawa Charter. (Attachment 2)
Both of these models embody systems thinking.
For this assessment task, you will choose a real world example of a health promotion initiative and critique it by referring to the Ottawa Charter model of integrated health promotion, and/or the Victorian Department of Health integrated health promotion model.
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Attachment 2
Victorian Department of Health Integrated Health Promotion model
1. Address the broader determinants of health, recognising that health is influenced by more than genetics, individual lifestyles and provision of health care, and that political, social, economic and environmental factors are critical.
2. Base activities on the best available data and evidence, both with respect to why there is a need for action in a particular area and what is most likely to effect sustainable change.
3. Act to reduce social inequities and injustice, helping to ensure every individual, family and community group may benefit from living, learning and working in a health promoting environment.
4. Emphasise active consumer and community participation in processes that enable and encourage people to have a say about what influences their health and wellbeing and what would make a difference.
5. Empower individuals and communities, through information, skill development, support, advocacy and structural change strategies, to have an understanding of what promotes health, wellbeing and illness and to be able to mobilise resources necessary to take control of their own lives.
6. Explicitly consider difference in gender and culture, recognising that gender and culture lie at the heart of the way in which health beliefs and behaviours are developed and transmitted.
7. Work in collaboration, understanding that while programs may be initiated by the health sector, partnerships must be actively sought across a broad range of sectors, including those organisations that may not have an explicit health focus. This focus aims to build on the capacity of a wide range of sectors to deliver quality integrated health promotion programs; and to reduce the duplication and fragmentation of health promotion effort.
