Health promotion in Viet Nam

Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health. It moves beyond a focus on individual behaviour towards a wide range of social and environmental interventions.

The 9th Global Conference on Health Promotion held in Shanghai in 2016 emphasized three key areas of health promotion including, good governance, health literacy and healthy cities.

Good Governance: Health promotion requires policy makers across all government departments to make health a central line of government policy, to factor health implications into all the decisions they take, and prioritize policies that help create a healthy living environment to promote good health, prevent people from becoming ill and protect them from injuries.

Health literacy: People need to acquire the knowledge, skills and information to make healthy choices, such as the food they eat and healthcare services they need. In order to make these choices, they need access to opportunities, and assurance of an environment where people can demand further policy actions to further improve their health.

Healthy cities: Cities have a key role to play in promoting good health. Strong leadership and commitment at the municipal level is essential to healthy urban planning and to build up preventive measures in communities and primary health care facilities. From healthy cities evolve healthy countries and, ultimately, a healthier world.