Health Promotion Settings: An Overview

Abstract

Since the Ottawa Charter (WHO, 1986) highlighted the idea that health is created within the settings of people’s everyday lives, where they learn, work, play and love, the settings approach has become an established component of the global health promotion agenda for action. The World Health Organization (WHO, 1998) has defined settings as the context in which people engage in daily activities and in which environmental, organizational and personal factors interact to affect health and wellbeing. The WHO definition also argues that normally, settings can be identified as having physical boundaries, a range of people with defined roles, and an organizational structure. Making these contexts the object of health promotion intervention and inquiry uses a wide range of processes and takes many different forms (Poland et al., 2009), but frequently involves some form of organizational development, including change to the physical environment and to the organizational structure (see Whitelaw et al., 2001 for a critical overview).