The World Health Organisation (WHO) describes Health Promotion as: "the process of enabling individuals and communities to increase control of the determinants of health and therefore improve their health". Health Promotion represents a comprehensive social and political process. It not only embraces actions directed at strengthening skills and capacities of individuals, but also action towards changing social, environmental and economic conditions as to alleviate their impact on public and individual health.
Health promotion is based on a social model of health where improvements in health and wellbeing are achieved by directing efforts towards addressing the social and environmental political, social, economic and environmental factors that effect health and produce inequities.
The social determinants of health are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age, including the health system. These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources at global, national and local levels, which are themselves influenced by policy choices. The social determinants of health are mostly responsible for health inequities - the unfair and avoidable differences in health status seen within and between countries. Health Promotion aims to take action on these determinants.
In Victoria, the term 'integrated health promotion' refers to agencies and organisations from a wide range of sectors and communities in a catchment working in a collaborative manner using a mix of health promotion interventions and capacity building strategies to address priority health and wellbeing issues (DHS).
The CHPCP has a leadership role in supporting catchment planning and ensuring maximum member organisation effort to reduce duplication and fragmentation of effort in the catchment. This contributes to achieving consistency for a population health approach.
The PCPs role is also to strengthen the capacity of the system to plan, implement and evaluate health promotion programs and to reorient services to be population health focused.
Central Hume PCPs IHP vision is to 'improve the health and wellbeing of our local communities' through capacity building by:
- building an evidence-base through research and analysis
- applying a collaborative planning processes
- evaluating outcomes
The CHPCP IHP Advisory Group Plan and Progress report is available to download here.
