Chapter 33 What are the objectives of health promotion?
The objectives of health promotion are: (1) to prevent disease; and (2) to promote health and well-being.
Health promotion is relevant to almost all areas of medicine but most attention is focused on diseases that have a substantial lifestyle component (Box 1).
Individual prevention
This school of thought believes that health is strongly influenced by the behaviour and conditions of individuals and can, therefore, be improved by changing the individuals’ health behaviours by education, advertising, technological interventions, such as seat belts, or making the holes in salt cellars smaller, as well as special medical treatment and screening. This approach fits with much medical thinking, which tends to be oriented towards treating individual patients. The most common form is probably the provision of leaflets informing patients about lifestyle factors (Fig. 1). Unfortunately, individualistic prevention involving education alone is rarely effective (see pp. 76–77). Also, there can be an element of patient-blaming in individual health promotion. This may be inappropriate because in most diseases addressed by health promotion, such as cardiovascular disease, the patient’s behaviour is only one causal factor among many.
