Public policy for health promotion: a special curated collection.

Abstract

The idea that policy-making is required for the promotion of population health is not new. It was implicitly recognized by medieval and renaissance approaches to policing disease outbreaks [e.g. the establishment of quarantine procedures—(Sehdev, 2002) and having a ‘Gesundheits-Polizey’ or ‘health police’—(von Kotz, 1821)]. The legislation of hygiene and sanitation entered the modern public health canon in the 19th century with public health acts developed, debated (often for decades) and adopted across the world. Some of these public policies are more strictly enforced and sanctioned than others. The current challenges faced by the public health community in relation to the ‘anti-vaxxers’ demonstrate how a more romantic and simplistic version of imposing rules and procedures for disease prevention and health promotion is becoming a contest over facts, alternative facts, beliefs, cosmology and the public good. It appears that some health issues are very strictly monitored and regulated through public policy [e.g. a small group of infectious diseases under the International Health Regulations—(Baker and Fidler, 2006)]. Other health domains are contestable in spite of strong evidence for or against particular public policy engagement [e.g. anti-microbial resistance—(Berendonk et al., 2015) or psychotropic drugs—(Tinasti et al., 2019)]. And then there is a class of health challenges that is often referred to as ‘wicked’ or ‘fuzzy’. They include obesity, the health dimensions of climate change, general ecological and planetary health, and Aboriginal (health) inequity (Briggs, n.d.). Comprehensive- and system-based packages of public policy for those issues [as dictated by virtually endless scholarly analyses of these wicked problems, see for instance the Foresight Obesity Systems Map (Ulijaszek, 2015)] are lacking, haphazard, disconnected, incongruous and/or un-evidenced. Apologists for the lack of tried and tested public policy in these spaces claim that we need to deploy more ‘complexity science’ [e.g. (Keshavarz Mohamadi, 2019)].