Health Promotion Practice: Power and Empowerment.

DESCRIPTION

In health promotion, the concept of power can be defined as the ability to create or resist change, and this is an important foundation for individual and community health. By enabling people to empower themselves, health promoters can provide the capacity for the individual or community to change their lives and their living conditions, and therefore their health. Health Promotion Practice explores the issue of how such an approach to health promotion practice can improve a community's success towards achieving healthier conditions through its own actions.

Placing empowerment at the heart of health promotion practice, and offering advice for health promoters who accept the challenge to work in such a way, Health Promotion Practice defines key concepts of health, health promotion and community empowerment. It also:

• Introduces readers to a 'social' model of health promotion practice, one that attempts to get at the underlying social determinants of disease;
• Helps readers understand the importance of power relations and their transformation in this practice;
• Introduces readers to a new `community capacity-building' approach to plan,implement and evaluate health promotion programmes.
• Health Promotion Practice is an invaluable resource to students and practitioners of health promotion who want to help empower the communities that they work with.

In the context of this work, health promotion practice is seen as a political activity that attempts to get at the underlying social determinants of disease. The author emphasizes the importance of power relations in health outcomes and introduces a methodology for "planning, implementing and evaluating empowering health promotion programs. Across ten chapters he examines discourses of health, the operation of power within health promotion practice, the reconciliation of tensions between top-down and bottom-up health promotion practices, and examples and assessments of empowering health promotion practices.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Health promotion in context
• Promoting Health: It all Depends on What We Mean by 'Health'
• Power Transformation and Health Promotion Practice
• Community Empowerment and Health Promotion Practice
• Addressing the Tensions in Health Promotion Programming
• 'Parallel-Tracking' Community Empowerment into Health Promotion Programming
• The Domains of Community Empowerment
• Building Community Empowerment Approaches in Health Promotion
• Evaluating Community Empowerment Building Approaches
• Implications for an Empowering Health Promotion Practice
  

BOOK REVIEWS

In 1847 a typhoid epidemic was ravaging Silesia in Russia. The government hired a little known pathologist Rudolf Virchow to look into it. They expected a report on how to improve the supply of clean drinking water; instead they got a young man inciting the people of Silesia to discover and then achieve their own needs in terms of education, freedom and welfare (and clean water). According to the author, Virchow was one of the first people who recognised the importance of empowerment in health promotion practice.

Health Promotion Practice is written by Glenn Laverack who has worked in health promotion at local, regional and national levels. He defines power as the “ability to create or resist change” and empowerment as the process by which people attain power. He draws on his own experiences and the published literature to make compelling arguments that a community’s success in promoting its own health depends on its ability to make decisions and then organise itself and act on those decisions.

The book starts by looking at the foundations of health promotion and then builds on these to examine the roles of power transformation and community empowerment in practice. It addresses tensions that may result from empowerment empowerment and ends by looking at how best to evaluate the success or failure of community empowerment approaches. Laverack challenges accepted truths throughout and gives real-life examples of community empowerment from around the world to support his ideas.

The book is fairly short and it religiously avoids jargon. It is likely to be of interest to students and experts alike. The author deserves high praise for it. Virchow also deserved high praise for his work in Silesia, but unfortunately all he got was his marching orders.

'This book written from an international perspective and thus eminently readable by a wider audience, draws on the author's considerable experience and is amply supplied with a good range of illustrations from real-life practice…The logical structure and accessible style makes this a useful addition to the personal library of anyone who has an interest in "bottom-up" empowerment-based approaches to health promotion' - RCN Research Headlines

'The author draws on a wealth of personal experiences in the field, giving the book both readability and credibility. Good examples from different international contexts, illustrated in relevant case studies, let the reader relate theory to practice and bring the concepts to life. The author takes the central thrust of health promotion for the past few decades and unravels it for the reader in a clear, comprehensive way' - Health Matters