ABSTRACT
An effective health promotion service within a nation requires a synergistic relationship between public policy-making and education. In recent years England has moved towards this position and is currently beginning to seriously address the implementation of WHO’s HFA 2000 goals through health promotion and the healthy cities initiatives. This chapter has attempted to provide an overview of the contemporary health education scene and its historical antecedents.
England has a central Health Education Authority which launches mass media campaigns and supports the critically important infra-structure of interpersonal health education delivered by professional and lay health educators. Its system of health education is special in that each district health authority has a health education or health promotion unit employing specialist health education staff whose role is to support, stimulate and co-ordinate the activities of the interpersonal infra-structure mentioned above. Major features of the work of these ‘agencies’ have been described and in particular the work of schools, primary health care and community development. Despite a limited presence in the workplace, the non–existence of patient education in hospitals and the threat to health education in schools posed by the new national curriculum, the future looks reasonably bright. Health promotion appears to be popular with central government – often for the wrong reasons – and the slow growth of health education units continues. Important developments in primary care will hopefully transfuse into the acute sector; community health projects with their outstanding potential for addressing the major health problems of disadvantaged people will receive a major boost from newly established local authority units in the pursuit of healthy cities.
