A gram of prevention is worth a kilo of cure. But helping people to live a healthier lifestyle is not an easy task. Health promotion, as defined by the World Health Organization, is the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health.

This includes:

• health education

• healthy policy making

• creating supportive environments

• using social marketing approaches        

The focus is on the development and evaluation of health interventions at both the behavioural and environmental levels. It is an interdisciplinary field, combining elements of psychology, communications, epidemiology, biomedicine, sociology, political science and management.