Concepts and movements in health promotion to guide educational practices

Abstract

Introduction: in health promotion, practices are necessary to trigger mechanisms aimed at the creation or recreation of a new mode of enhancing health, in order to overcome the still-oriented actions of the biological approach. Prevailing actions oh health care, although important to the sector, do not advance toward a positive concept. Objective: to analyse the historical process of health as a concept and care models in the search for a new model of health promotion. Methods: This is a refl ective review designed to understand and appraise the international and national literature from Medline/PubMed, Lilacs and the Scientifi c Electronic Library (Scielo). For the organisation of data, articles were separated by themes, and the process of categorisation was conducted based on content analysis. Results: Despite having the knowledge that consistent actions with the assumptions of health promotion are of great importance to quality of life and equity in health, implementing them remains a challenge due to the predominance of curative practices and an individualistic approach. These practices, in turn, are revealed to be a refl ection of the concept of health that has passed from the absence of disease to a process related to social, political, economic and cultural factors. Conclusion: The concept of health has been transformed from historical ideas, refl ecting the emergence of new formulations about thinking and doing and, consequently, new proposals for changes in welfare models of health. Therefore, although the new model of healthcare has been structured from a health promotion perspective; there are still features of hegemonic models with the predominance of curative practices.