The meaning of health promotion: a personal view

Abstract

Far more consensus on what ‘health promotion’ means has emerged over the last two years. This broad term refers to an approach and philosophy of care which reflects awareness of the multiplicity of factors which affect health and which encourages everyone to value independence and individual choice. Such a philosophy would also reject inequality in provision of resources to combat ill health and the imposition of one set of values, however, beneficent, upon another. Free will and the ability of individuals or groups of people to determine the way they live are therefore of supreme importance. The reassertion of such values within the context of health in the quality of life has become necessary to combat certain developments and health care provision and to publicise the growing evidence that inequality in socio-economic status is associated with variations in levels of health.