The Importance Of Health Promotion

According to Public Health Ontario, health promotion is the process of introducing a variety of social and environmental programs including promoting healthy behaviors, enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health (2015). This is an important concept for many people in todays society especially here in Ontario as it is reported by Statistics Canada that 52.6% of people are obese or overweight (2013). Health Promotion doesn’t only refer to obesity but the whole well-being of a person in general. However, I believe that obesity is an important aspect of health promotion as it can lead to so many other health concerns such as heart disease and diabetes (Karriem-Norwood, 2014.). Health promotion is a very broad term
Even though they are all slightly different, they all have one main aspect in common; making people healthy. People need to be more aware of how to become healthy individuals as it will not only help themselves but also the health care system. For every one dollar that is put into health promotion programs it can save the healthcare system around three to five dollars by reducing the employee costs (Dombrowski, Snelling, & Kalick, 2014). Health promotion is also very effective in disease and illness prevention. If individuals know how to stay healthy and use the resources available to them to do so, then this will drastically reduce the rate at which people fall ill. I believe that health promotion should be brought to the attention of all parents with young children so they can teach their children how to not only live a healthy lifestyle but also maintain one. I understand that it is up to the government and individual health care systems to promote health, implement these programs and make it known to the public that they exist, however once that is done everyone should be encouraged to take full advantage of the opportunities given and become active members in their own health and
They are the liaison to doctors and have a lot of informative knowledge. Because nurses are always the ones dealing with patients they are the most likely to be the primary promoters of health. Nurses play a crucial part in the health care system as they are heavily relied on by all other hospital staff and I would consider them the backbones of every hospital. According to the article by Whitehead, health promotion and health education are two different things, yet they are inter-related (2011). I think that this is a vital detail in health promotion because health education is teaching people facts and knowledge about health but not actually how to achieve it, health promotion on the other hand essentially teaches an individual how to achieve a healthy lifestyle. Health education is still very important but should not get confused with health promotion. This is a common problem with nursing staff and can lead to the undermining of health promotion amongst nurses. (Whitehead,