Settings for Health Promotion: Linking Theory and Practice

Citation

Weare, K. (2000), "Settings for Health Promotion: Linking Theory and Practice", Health Education, Vol. 100 No. 5, pp. 223-224. https://doi.org/10.1108/he.2000.100.5.223.3

Readers of this journal will be well acquainted, perhaps almost to the point of satiation, with the concept of the health promoting school. As they will realise if they have read the opening paragraphs of a variety of recent papers we have published, this concept is but one manifestation of an approach which now largely dominates in health promotion, the holistic, “settings” approach. The settings approach, with its emphasis on the way the social, psychological, and often the physical context in which we live and work shapes our opportunities and choices in relation to health, has largely replaced the more traditional emphasis on behaviour change.

However, for an idea with such potency, the settings approach has, to date, lacked in‐depth analysis or many well worked examples to give it specificity and reality. Its theoretical underpinnings have been often delineated, but mostly in thin, official “keynote”‐type documents. So this packed volume provides a very welcome, in‐depth treatment of settings as a focal point for planning, implementing and evaluating health promotion. The authors are those who have been responsible for helping to form and shape the idea across the globe, and include contributors from the UK, the USA, Canada and Europe. Their chapters describe the state of the art in the theory and practice of a settings approach to health promotion, and examine a variety of contexts, which include the family, the school, the workplace, health care, the community and, fascinatingly, the state. Programmes are analysed for their efficiency and effectiveness, and following each chapter, two professionals comment on the programme from different perspectives, while case studies provide practical applications throughout the book. This book will be invaluable for anyone who is keen to look in more detail at the kind of work the health promoting school represents, and take an intelligent and critical interest in how it can be developed and evaluated.