Views of Health Promotion Online (VHPO) is alive and kicking at www.vhpo.net!

Abstract

IUHPE communications capacity is substantially expanded with the recent addition of Views of Health Promotion Online (VHPO), the online dialogue tool of the global health promotion community. VHPO is a forum where IUHPE members and non-members alike can post their views on IUHPE’s strategic development and on health promotion hot topics. IUHPE Student and Early CareerNetwork (ISECN)members volunteer to manage Dialogues (monitor for appropriate use, promote participation and summarise Dialogues that have completed their course). VHPO encourages dialogues in English, French and Spanish. VHPO hosts dialogues that are open to all who wish to participate. To add your views, you register in the system, which is a very simple process, and you need register just once. When you register you can select the language you are most comfortable with to navigate through the site (English, French, Spanish), but the Dialogues only develop in the languages they are originally posted in. VHPO provides a new opportunity for dialogue among all who are interested in health promotion, and also provides a bottom–up communication link between IUHPE members and leadership. Dialogues are summarised, and the summaries are published in IUHPE journals and discussed at the annual IUHPE Board of Trustees meetings. Using VHPO is one certain way to bring your ideas to the attention of the entire health promotion community. From time to time, Global Health Promotion will reproduce addresses presented at conferences, as we do in this issue, with the publication of Vincente Navarro’s address at the IUHPE conference in Torino on 9 September 2008, titled “Whatwemean by social determinants of health”. We will be selective in publishing addresses, seeking to illuminate the most significant (and perhaps controversial) presentations at our conferences. Our intention is to spark dialogue, and we now have a forum for dialogue, Views of Health Promotion Online (www.vhpo.net). Any reader who is motivated to do so can suggest any dialogue topic at the website, and we hope that some of you may wish to start a dialogue having one or more of Navarro’s points of emphasis as the starting point. Please contactme atmaurice.mittelmark@gmail.com, to make suggestions for the publication of addresses that you feel should be presented to Global Health Promotion’s readership. If youwould like to suggest aDialogue topic, simply click on the “submit a topic tab” www.vhpo.net. We will be sure that all IUHPEmembers know about your Dialogue, by informing them via email. Be an active user of VHPO and help it to succeed! In the three sections below, the Dialogues that were active at the time of this writing are summarised.