Consequently, with appropriate and effective health promotion, individuals and communities are better informed and armed to improve their health status and practices. The World Health Organisation (WHO) asserts that the keys to sustainable and effective health promotion are appropriate and timely public health policies. Such policies are designed and implemented in a way that addresses all the requirements of health and determinants such as food security, employment, working conditions, income, housing, security, gender, disabilities, and cultural diversity among other determinants of health (Dixey, 2013). In fact, in some countries and regions, health concerns are addressed in all public policies across departments and professions. Lamentably, in many liberalized nations, government and public health officials merely consider health promotion as health education and a social marketing tool with the only objective of changing people’s risky behaviors (Dixey, 2013).
Many scholars and researchers in the areas of health care have the opinion that health promotion should not be based on arbitrary wars on methods but ought to emphasize the idea of utility and the need to increase the potential of benefitting from a multidisciplinary approach, which would favor learning from divergent sources and disciplines. The WHO’s Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion of 1986 played a rather significant role in establishing health promotion as a key aspect of health care in modern times.
This Charter enforced and adopted at the first-ever WHO Global Conference on Health Promotion, paved the way for future conferences such as the Adelaide, Mexico City, and Jakarta conferences that functioned to make the health promotion agenda more relevant and clearer to the entire globe. All these conferences had the key objective of identifying and addressing the determinants of health such as food, education, shelter, and income. Rachel Dixey of Leeds Metropolitan University, UK is one of the renowned authors in the field of health care promotion.