Health promoting schools

A health promoting school can be characterised as a school constantly strengthening its capacity as a healthy setting for living, learning and working.

A health promoting school engages health and education officials, teachers, students, parents and community leaders in efforts to both promote health and support the educational success of all students and the whole school. It fosters health and learning with all the measures at its disposal, strives to provide supportive environments for health, and a range of key school health education and promotion programs and services.

A health promoting school implements policies, practices and other measures that respect individual social and cultural differences; provide multiple opportunities for success; and acknowledges good efforts and intentions alongside personal and whole of school achievements. It strives to improve the health of school personnel, families and community members as well as students, and works with community leaders to help them understand how the community contributes to health and education.

WHO’s Global School Health Initiative aims at helping all schools to become health promoting schools by, for example, encouraging and supporting international, national and subnational networks of health promoting schools, and helping to build national capacities to promote health through schools.

As defined in the World Health Organisation "Health Promotion Glossary of Terms 2021"

Health promotion is defined by WHO as being the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve their health. Health promotion represents a comprehensive social and political process. It not only embraces actions directed at strengthening the skills and capabilities of individuals, but also action directed towards changing social, environmental and economic determinants of health so as to optimise their positive impact on public and personal health. Health promotion is the process of enabling people, individually and collectively, to increase control over the determinants of health and thereby improve their health.

The Ottawa Charter identifies three basic strategies for health promotion. These are advocacy for health to create the essential conditions for health indicated above; enabling all people to achieve their full health potential; and mediating between the different interests in society in the pursuit of health. The Ottawa Charter identified five priority action areas: to build healthy public policy; create supportive environments for health; strengthen community action for health; develop personal skills; and re-orient health services.

These action areas remain vitally important in health promotion, and the underlying concepts have continued to evolve. Some of these actions – such as re-orienting health services and community action for health – remain but are represented with updated definitions. Others remain in the main body of the glossary but have evolved into different terms. For example, the concept of healthy public policy remains independently valid, but is now included within the contemporary concept of health in all policies. Similarly, developing personal skills is incorporated into definitions of skills for health and health literacy.

[edit] Related articles on Designing Buildings

• 35 Years of BREEAM and latest V7 mandatory update.
• A case study of adopting BIT-Kit: A method uncovering the impact buildings have on people.
• A measure of net well-being that incorporates the effect of housing environmental impacts.
• Airtightness of energy efficient buildings.
• Adapting 1965-1980 semi-detached dwellings in the UK to reduce summer overheating and the effect of the 2010 Building Regulations.
• BSRIA Briefing 2023. Cleaner Air, Better Tomorrow.
• Characteristics of buildings that impact wellbeing.
• Daylight benefits in healthcare buildings.
• Health and wellbeing impacts of natural and artificial lighting.
• Health and wellbeing at Kings Cross.
• Health promoting hospital.
• Healthy cities.
• Healthy islands.
• Infrastructure for health promotion
• Indoor air quality
• Integrated modelling, simulation and visualisation (MSV) for sustainable built healing environments (BHEs).
• Nuisance in construction.
• Nuisance smells.
• Odours in and around buildings.
• The design of extra care housing for older people and its impact on wellbeing: The East Sussex perspective.
• The daylight factor.
• The impact of the design of the Psychiatric inpatient facility on perceptions of Carer wellbeing.
• The real cost of poor housing.
• Transitioning to eco-cities: Reducing carbon emissions while improving urban welfare.
• The real cost of poor housing.
• Ubiquitous sensors to assess people’s energy consumption and wellbeing in domestic environments.
• Well-being and regeneration: Reflections from Carpenters Estate.
• Wellbeing and buildings.
• Wellbeing in Buildings TG 10/2025.
• Wellbeing and creativity in workplace design - case studies.

[edit] External links

Health promoting schools. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2020 (https://www.who.int/health-topics/health-promoting-schools#tab=tab_1, accessed 8 July 2021).

Global school health initiatives: Achieving health and education outcomes. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2017 (https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/259813/WHO-NMH-PND-17.7-eng.pdf;jsessionid=8894991456F711 8BB29244AECE91C6D5, accessed 8 July 2021).

Dadaczynski K, Jensen B, Sormunen M, von Seelen J, Vilaca T. Health, well-being and education: Building a sustainable future. The Moscow statement on Health Promoting Schools”, Health Education. 202; 120(1):11–19. doi: 10.1108/ HE-12-2019-0058.