Welcome to this issue of the International Journal of Health Promotion and Education which contains a number of interesting papers on a variety of subjects relevant to promoting health.
The paper by Maradzika et al. from Zimbabwe discusses factors associated with hospital admissions for people living with diabetes mellitus. It highlights a number of different factors which are significantly associated with hospital admission including some wider social determinants of health such as levels of education and lack of primary care or community-based support. The authors set out a number of recommendations to address this issue at individual and structural levels.
Luciani et al’s paper explores the effect of large-scale, ‘mass’ community-based sport and physical activity event on population health through the Sports Day in Canada initiative. Specifically it looks at the effects on organizations and concludes that a major benefit was increased awareness and interest in the community which, it is proposed, may lead to more participation in sport and physical activity. This in turn has huge benefits for population health. A paper by the same team of authors was awarded the latest annual Pittu Laungani award for best paper in the International Journal of Health Promotion and Education (see Sports day in Canada: a longitudinal evaluation by Lauren White, Alicia Luciani, Tanya R. Berry, Sameer Deshpande, Amy Latimer-Cheung, Norm O’Reilly, Ryan E. Rhodes, John C. Spence, Mark S. Tremblay, and Guy Faulkner, International Journal Of Health Promotion And Education Vol. 54:1, 2016).
Another Canadian paper by Lammertsen et al. considers health equity message framing from a Canadian perspective. Based on their findings, the authors recommend that heath equity messages are clear, simple and concise, colloquial and cohesive; recommendations that appear to have universal transferability to other contexts across the globe. Lammertsen et al. argue that the findings point to opportunities to improve health equity messaging in future but that such actions should go hand in hand with health sector capacity building. Health equity is a major goal of health promotion and the authors suggest that exploration of innovative approaches will help to achieve this.
Finally, Laferriere and Crighton bring us back to the wider determinants of health in their discussion of environmental health risks during pregnancy. Drawing on the perspectives of mothers the authors note maternal concerns about a range of environmental hazards. They also note the lack of information and education that the mothers felt they had received during pregnancy and the potential to address this through simple educational and informational means. Given recent life-course explanations for health inequalities this would seem salient. This should, however, occur in tandem with efforts at an environmental and policy level to reduce such hazards.
The recent Shanghai Declaration on promoting health in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development which resulted from the 9th Global Conference on Health Promotion in Shanghai in November 2016 highlights several areas for action that have resonance with the issues raised in these papers including acting on all of the determinants of health in order to empower people to increase control over their lives. Building on the health promotion conferences that have gone before, from Ottawa in 1986 to Helsinki in 2013, the declaration calls for bold political choices and good governance and outlines a number of commitments to take forward the health promotion agenda on a global level in order to work towards meeting the Sustainable Development Goals.
We hope you enjoy reading this issue and, as always, we welcome your comments on the journal as well as your contributions. Please do get in touch with us via email at [email protected].