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During times of budgetary restraint, the opportunity costs of health care expenditure are highlighted. As a result, policies on the prevention of ill‐health, which may have always been desirable for their own sake, are increasingly being viewed as alternatives to expenditures on curative care. Within a fixed budget, such alternatives share a common objective to maximise the overall return, measured in terms of reduced morbidity and mortality, to the expenditure. Health education is advocated as a major instrument of prevention policy. Since the link between increased knowledge, changed attitudes and altered behaviour is unproved, this article considers only those health education programmes which aim at specific behavioural changes. These programmes alone yield a return which can be com‐pared with those from expenditures in curative care.

This article aims to reflect on the role of prevention with respect to active ageing and why early action and intervention to promote active ageing at a societal, familial and personal level has potentially become somewhat of a necessity.

The article is the observations of injury prevention and contemporary active ageing initiatives in the UK from a practitioner's perspective.

The potential contribution of prevention towards optimised active ageing has frequently been recognised and supported by studies and programs from around the world. This article supports the theme that prevention can play an important role in promoting active ageing.

The article provides a simple and structured reflection upon the potential role of injury prevention in active ageing and also provides a framework for further analysis and discussion.

This paper identifies seven points in favour of integrating mental health promotion and general health promotion strategies: mental, physical and social aspects of health are inextricably inter‐linked; mental health is all too easily overlooked in thought and deed; life circumstances affect mental, social and physical health; mental, social and physical health have intertwined and shared roots; we need concerted action on these intertwined and shared roots; even topic‐specific action needs to be co‐ordinated and the promotion of mental health is a foundation for the promotion of general health. Attention is then focused on how such integration can be achieved, with reference to the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion and the ‘arenas’ approach to programmes. The paper concludes by widening out the notion of integration to that of health promotion as an integral part of our collective way of life, advocating the idea of ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body in a healthy society’.

The purpose of this study is to explore managers' understanding of workplace health promotion (WHP) and experiences of WHP activity within small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in a Health and Social Care Trust area of Northern Ireland. The paper aims to focus on engagement with activities within the context of prevention of ill‐health and health protection, lifestyle issues and working culture and the environment as defined in the Luxembourg Declaration on WHP.

A Heideggerian interpretive phenomenological methodology is adopted, using in‐depth telephone interviews with a purposive sample of 18 SME managers. Data are analysed using Benner's strategy for data analysis.

“Levels of awareness of WHP activity” are revealed as a central theme and interpreted as “high awareness activities”, including the need to: preserve and protect employee health and safety, prevent ill‐health and injury and promote employees' quality of daily living, and “low awareness activities”, including the provision of training and development, human resource management and environmental considerations.

An “Iceberg” model, grounded in the data, draws attention to the limited awareness of what constitutes WHP activities and the untapped meaningfulness of organisational and environmental activities.

The purpose of this paper is to review systematically the available literature relating to the implementation of peer education to promote health and healthy behaviour in prisons.

The authors undertook a narrative systematic review of Medline, EMBASE, CINAHL, Psychinfo, Web of Science and Cochrane databases. Relevant journals and reference lists were hand searched for relevant articles to be included in the review. Of the abstracts found, full‐text papers were retrieved for those papers deemed as possibly fulfilling the inclusion criteria of the review.

A total of 3,033 abstracts were identified leading to 46 full‐text articles being retrieved, of which ten were included in the review. Peer education in prisons can have an impact on attitudes, knowledge, and behaviour intention regarding HIV risk behaviour. The research findings were inconclusive for the impact of peer education upon illicit drug use and injecting practice. There was a paucity of research evaluating the impact of peer education upon mental ill health, obesity, diet, smoking, or self‐management of chronic physical diseases.

Peer education is effective in reducing risk of HIV transmission. It is possible that peer education for mental health issues is stigmatising, presenting an opportunity for further research activity. The impact of peer education upon illicit drug use practice, obesity, diet, smoking, and self‐management of chronic physical diseases also presents further research opportunities. Research evaluating models of active peer educator involvement in health service delivery and organisation is also lacking.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss contemporary approaches to workplace health and well‐being, articulating key differences in the intervention architecture between public and workplace health contexts and implications for intervention design.

Contemporary practice is discussed in light of calls for a paradigm shift in occupational health from a treatment orientation to an holistic approach focused on mitigation of the causes of ill health and the promotion of well‐being. In practice, relatively few organizations have or seem able to engage with a broader perspective that encompasses challenges to health and well‐being associated with contextual organizational drivers, e.g. job design/role, workload, systems of reward, leadership style and the underpinning climate. Drawing upon insights from public health and the workplace safety tradition, the scope for broadening the perspective on intervention (in terms of vectors of harm addressed, theory of change and intervention logic) is discussed.

There are important differences in scope and options for intervention between public health and workplace health contexts. While there is scope to emulate public health practice, this should not constrain thinking over intervention opinions. Increased awareness of these key differences within work organizations, and an evidence‐based epidemiological approach to learning has the potential to strengthen and broaden the approach to workplace health and well‐being management.

The authors argue that approaches to workplace well‐being interventions that selectively cross‐fertilise and adapt elements of public health interventions offer promise for realising a broader change agenda and for building inherently healthy workplaces.

The need to improve the mental health of construction personnel has increased owing to high rates of mental health problems. Hence, a proper evaluation of a mix of implementable intervention strategies in the workplace will assist in achieving good mental health. Although there are recommendations in occupational health literature on strategies that can be adopted, it is unknown how they fit appropriately into the construction industry. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify the mix of strategies for the construction industry and their criticality.

Drawing from the context of developing countries with Nigeria as a case study, data was collected using the quantitative technique. A questionnaire survey consisting of 31 intervention strategies was administered to a purposive sample of 45 experts in the Nigerian construction industry. The data collected was analyzed using mean score analysis and fuzzy synthetic evaluation.

The study revealed that strategies focused on boosting employee morale and engagement and interpersonal relationship offer higher chances of improving mental health among construction personnel. The study showed that implementing job crafting and sculpting may benefit the industry. The analysis showed that the overall criticality of the intervention strategies to the Nigerian construction workplace is high, suggesting that if implemented, the mental health of construction personnel can be improved.

The study provides an initial understanding of the most critical multi-level intervention strategies to enhance good mental health among construction personnel in Nigeria and the global construction industry. These findings serve as a guide to policymakers and advocate the implementation of strategies to adopt for a psychologically healthy construction workplace in developing countries.

Taking the principles of health promotion as a starting point, this paper begins with a review of the ways in which mental health has been defined in the mental health promotion literature. In order to move beyond definitions that revolve only around the absence of illness or reductionist lists of individual skills and attributes, it then introduces a model derived from health promotion theory. Finally, the paper concludes with an example of the model's application to promoting the well‐being of mental health service users through the provision of evidence‐based employment support.