Health promotion is a systematic process designed to enable people to increase control over, and improve, their health. Interventions facilitate lifestyle changes that enhance awareness, change behavior, and create environments that support good health practices. Health promotion efforts focus on the individual, social, physical, economic, and political factors that affect health, and include such activities as the promotion of physical fitness, healthy living, and good nutrition.
Health promotion includes efforts to prevent ill health through risk reduction or early detection, to prevent avoidable complications of an irreversible, manifest disease and to prevent reoccurrence of ill health. In addition to reduction in morbidity and mortality, health promotion seeks to improve the quality of life.
Healthy People 2020, our nation's health agenda, describes the 12 Leading Health Indicators that will be used to measure the health of the Nation over the next 10 years. As a group, the Leading Health Indicators reflect the major health concerns in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century. They were selected on the basis of their ability to motivate action, the availability of data to measure progress, and their importance as public health issues. Health promotion and disease prevention efforts focus primarily on improvement in the Leading Health Indicators:
Access to Health Services
Clinical Preventive Services
Environmental Quality
Injury and Violence
Maternal, Infant, and Child Health
Mental Health
Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity
Oral Health
Reproductive and Sexual Health
Social Determinants
Substance Abuse
Tobacco
Coordinator:
Dr. Deborah Wooldridge
Eppler Center 112
(419) 372-7851 dgwoold@bgsu.edu
Senior Administrative Assistant:
Sue Bigaila
Eppler Center 115
(419) 372-2505 sbigail@bgsu.edu
