Health promotion is a systematic process designed to enable people to increase control over, and improve, their health. Interventions facilitate lifestyle changes that enhance awareness, change behavior, and create environments that support good health practices. Health promotion efforts focus on the individual, social, physical, economic, and political factors that affect health, and include such activities as the promotion of physical fitness, healthy living, and good nutrition.
Health promotion includes efforts to prevent ill health through risk reduction or early detection, to prevent avoidable complications of an irreversible, manifest disease and to prevent reoccurrence of ill health. In addition to reduction in morbidity and mortality, health promotion seeks to improve the quality of life.
Healthy People 2030, our nation’s health agenda, describes the 12 Leading Health Indicators that will be used to measure the health of the Nation over the next 10 years. As a group, the Leading Health Indicators (LHIs) reflect the major health concerns in the United States. They were selected on the basis of their ability to motivate action, the availability of data to measure progress, and their importance as public health issues. Health promotion and disease prevention efforts focus primarily on improvement in the Leading Health Indicators (LHIs):
- Access to Health Services
- Clinical Preventive Services
- Environmental Quality
- Injury and Violence
- Maternal, Infant, and Child Health
- Mental Health
- Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity
- Oral Health
- Reproductive and Sexual Health
- Social Determinants
- Substance Abuse
- Tobacco
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