Oral Health | Clinical and Risk Asessment | What is health promotion?

What is health promotion?
Session overview
Description
This session outlines the background to the development of health promotion, and the key principles and strategies underpinning health and oral health promotion.

Learning objectives
By the end of this session you will be able to:

• describe the 'upstream and downstream' approach to preventing disease
• list the determinants of health
• list the 5 Ottawa conference principles for effective health promotion
• give examples of oral health promotion activities

Prerequisites
Before commencing this session you should have:

• completed e-Den session Patient assessment/Profiling the patient/Societal and professional perspectives of health and disease
• a basic understanding of the concept and importance of clinical prevention of oral disease
• a basic overview of the locality where you practice dentistry

Health promotion aims to prevent disease and promote health, with a focus on society and the environment rather than the individual.

It is about creating the right conditions for the:

...easy choice to be the healthy choice [1](read details regarding the reference).

You will already have spent some time undertaking clinical prevention with your patients , and possibly become frustrated that they seem disinterested, or perhaps unable to follow your dental health education advice.

This might be for many reasons, but often it is because many of the factors which influence whether a person undertakes a healthy behaviour are outside the individual’s control.

In this session, we look at approaches to preventing disease. We examine the determinants of health and the key features of health promotion within particular areas of action. We also consider examples of oral health promotion.