Health Promotion Practice: Power and Empowerment

In this book, Glenn Laverack uses one definition of the concept of power "as the ability to create or resist change, and this is an important foundation for individual and community health." By enabling people to empower themselves, health promoters can provide the capacity for the individual and community to change their lives and their living conditions, and therefore their health. "Health Promotion Practice" explores the issue of how such an approach to health promotion practice can improve a community's success towards achieving healthier conditions through its own actions.

Placing empowerment at the heart of health promotion practice and offering advice for health promoters, "Health Promotion Practice" defines key concepts of health, health promotion and community empowerment. It also introduces readers to a 'social' model of health promotion practice that attempts to get at the underlying social determinants of disease; helps readers to understand the importance of power relations and their transformation in this practice; and introduces readers to a new 'community capacity-building' approach to plan, implement and evaluate health promotion programmes.

Table of Contents

• Health promotion in context
• Promoting Health: It all Depends on What We Mean by 'Health'
• Power Transformation and Health Promotion Practice
• Community Empowerment and Health Promotion Practice
• Addressing the Tensions in Health Promotion Programming
• 'Parallel-Tracking' Community Empowerment into Health Promotion Programming
• The Domains of Community Empowerment
• Building Community Empowerment Approaches in Health Promotion
• Evaluating Community Empowerment Building Approaches
• Implications for an Empowering Health Promotion Practice

Read a summary of the author's related book, "Public Health: Power, Empowerment and Professional Practice".

Glenn Laverack has worked in health promotion for more than fifteen years at community, regional and national levels. He now works as a freelance consultant.

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