Health Promotion: A developing focus area over the years

Abstract

In 1953 when the Nordic School of Public Health was founded, the aim of public health programmes was disease prevention more than health promotion. This was not unusual, since at this time health usually was seen as the opposite of disease and illness. However, with the Ottawa Charter of 1986, the World Health Organization made a crucial change to view health not as a goal in itself but as the means to a full life. In this way, health promotion became a first priority and fundamental action for the modern society. This insight eventually reached NHV and in 2002 – 50 years after the foundation – an associate professorship was established with a focus on health promotion. Nevertheless, the concept of health promotion had been integrated with or mentioned in courses run prior to the new post. Subsequently, a wide spectrum of courses in health promotion was introduced, such as ‘Empowerment for Child and Adolescent Health Promotion’, ‘Salutogenesis – from theory to practice’ and ‘Health, Stress and Coping’. More than half of all doctoral theses undertaken at NHV during these years had health promotion as their theme. As a derivative, the Nordic Health Promotion Research Network (NHPRN) was established in 2007 with bi-annual meetings at NHV.