MHST 631- Final Reflection

As MHST 631- Health Promotion I comes to an end, I would like to take a moment to reflect on my learning journey. Prior to this course, I had only studied health promotion briefly in my undergraduate in the context of community nursing. Overall, the course has been a positive in gaining a better appreciation for health promotion and how it differs from conventional health care focus of disease treatment in the reactive vs proactive nature. My greatest discovery through out the course is the appreciation of acute and chronic care medicine and the need for broader patient focused approaches that span past the individual level. The World Health Organization (2022) defines “Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over and to improve their health. It moves beyond focusing on individual behaviour towards a wide range of social and environmental interventions” which differs from acute care which has been my professional experience. My experience in acute care has not been to involve all stakeholders can enable behaviour changes to address health related issues from a population perspective but rather providing individual resources based of patients needs at the time of admission.

The weekly discussion posts and assignments provided an opportunity to explore core concepts of health promotion from the Ottawa charter and its action strategies, importance of socio-ecological lens and considerations of international perspective such as sustainable development goals. This course has fostered a self awareness to the importance of health promotion and the need to address ongoing socio-ecological health inequities to improve the health of all. As this course ends, this is the start of my journey to improve my knowledge of health promotion and seek out opportunities to personally support health promotion initiatives.

References

World Health Organization. (2022). Health Promotion. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/westernpacific/about/how-we-work/programmes/health-promotion#:~:text=Health%20promotion%20is%20the%20process