Health Promotion in Schools, Universities, Workplaces, and Communities

Download or read book Health Promotion in Schools, Universities, Workplaces, and Communities written by Graça S. Carvalho and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2024-12-17 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Health education, well-being improvement, and advocacy are effective health promotion strategies among cutting-edge Public Health practices. Salutogenic perspectives, rooted in ecological models, have taken their rightful place to empower individuals and communities to change their life ecosystems and preserve and improve their health. It is imperative to shift from targeting protective or risk factors, which have linear causal relationships with health conditions and/or comorbidities, and encompass a systemic understanding of the role of health determinants in creating health. Individual, collective, and structural ecological approaches can better reduce health inequities. Moreover, engaging the presumed beneficiaries from such strategies ensures that actual needs are identified, and choices are context-specific. It improves the whole implementation process as well as its results. Higher levels of participation, such as co-creation, imply a bottom-up, voluntary, collaborative process rooted in values of diversity, mutual trust, openness, autonomy, freedom, and respect, as well as shared expertise, responsibility, and decision-making, which are essential values in co-creating health promotion.