What is Health Promotion?
Health Promotion is the science and art of helping people improve their lifestyle and enabling them to have control and improve their health. Health Promotion supports personal and social development through providing information, and enhancing life skills. By so doing, it increases the options available to people to exercise more control over their own health and over their environments, and to make the choices that will preserve their precious health.
We recognise the importance of enabling people to learn throughout life, to prepare them for all of the life stages, including how to cope with illness and injuries. We recognise we can communicate best to people by reaching out actively, whether in our schools, at home (e.g. through mass media) at work places, public places, and in other community settings.
Everything we do in Health Promotion is objective focused, meaning we track the return on investment (in terms of knowledge, attitude and behavioural change) of resources, e.g. time and money.
Our Role and objectives:
Our primary role is to change the behaviours of the people of Abu Dhabi to reduce unhealthy behaviours and increase healthy behaviours. Our strategy is to focus at the following objectives:
- Raise Abu Dhabi population knowledge about health.
- Encourage Abu Dhabi community, individuals and organizations, gaining skills to contribute in improving their health.
- Promote and contribute toward healthy attitude and behavior within Abu Dhabi population.
Applied approaches to achieve objectives of Health Promotion are:
Above the line that utilizes mass media and out doors to reach target audience.
Below the line that utilizes outreach activities directly with target audience.