Health Promotion Initiative

Running Head: HEALTH PROMOTION INITIATIVE 1
Health Promotion Initiative
Name
Institution
Date

HEALTH PROMOTION INITIATIVE 2
Health Promotion Initiative
The first International Conference on Health Promotion culminated with the formulation
of the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion in 1986 in Ottawa, Canada. In this conference,
national governments, global and local healthcare organizations, as well as local communities,
were sensitized on the need to realize the objective of "Health for All” through health promotion
by the year 2000 and beyond (Lee, 2015). The World Health Organization (WHO); the organizer
of this conference envisaged the significance of health promotion as a pathway of advancing all
global citizens an “economically productive level of health by the year 2000” and beyond. In the
Australian context, many health promotion initiatives have been launched to improve the
healthcare situations of all Australians since the declaration of the Ottawa Charter for Health
Promotion. One such health promotion initiative is the “National Alcohol Strategy; 2018-2026”.
This paper involves the detailed analysis of this health promotion initiative in relation to the
determinants of health for the principal purposes of determining its efficacy in advancing
Australians with better healthcare outcomes.
The WHO recognized alcohol abuse as a primary healthcare concern in 2008. To this
end, the body has come up with formidable healthcare initiatives to reduce the harm of alcohol
consumption across the globe. The WHO observed that in 2004 alone approximately 2.5 million
people lost their lives worldwide as a result of alcohol-related causes. Of this number, young
people of between ages 15 and 29 were approximately 320,000. Moreover, the WHO contended
that harmful alcohol abuse constitutes the third leading risk factor for disability and premature
deaths globally (World Health Organization, 2008). In its approach, the WHO demands world
nations need to ratify its strategic health promotion initiative provisions into national and local
specific strategies in combating the same.

HEALTH PROMOTION INITIATIVE 3
The principal aim of the “National Alcohol Strategy; 2018-2026” is to advance a federal
framework to promote the prevention and minimization of alcohol-related harm amongst
individuals, families, and communities throughout Australia. In doing so, the Australian
government; Department of Health is committed to the continuous identification of national
priority areas of action as well as opportunities for action plans to be considered and taken.
Moreover, the initiative is committed to promoting and enabling partnership, commitment and
collaboration between the government and non-government sectors in the achievement of the
same. The initiative is geared towards achieving a 10% reduction in health degrading alcohol
consumption. Harmful alcohol consumption refers to alcohol consumption levels that posit risks
and injury to individuals from any single alcohol drinking occasion in a span of just one month.
These levels also relate to alcohol consumption levels that have a high potential of subjecting
individuals to high risks of contracting diseases or injury in their lifetime.
Achieving the goals of health promotion initiatives are however bound to be haunted by
the facets and factors informing the social determinants of health. The WHO (2008) contends
that the social determinants of health are tightly linked to the socioeconomic conditions facing
different individuals, communities and social settings. Their distribution across different
populations posits a direct impact on the health status of these people and may act to either
promote positive health outcomes or suppress the same. As such, by and large, they sharply
deviate from the individual risk factors such as genetics and behavioral risk factors that may lead
to the health deterioration of a person at a personal level.
The WHO asserts that the unequal distribution of the social determinants of health is not
to be taken as a "natural" phenomenon but rather the result of poor management of social

HEALTH PROMOTION INITIATIVE 4
policies, bad politics, and unfair economic arrangements. Moreover, these determinants posit an
intimate relationship with health outcomes and tend to cluster together- for example, people
living under poverty are more or less expected to experience adverse social determinants
(Newman, Baum, Javanparast, O'Rourke, & Carlon, 2015). To this end, the formulation,
planning, and implementation of health promotion initiatives tend to be curtailed by the rampant
inequalities of these social determinants across different social settings. In a report developed by
the Commission on Social Determinants of Health of the WHO dubbed “Closing the gap in a
generation: Health equity through action on the social determinants of health" in 2008, the
WHO identified two striking areas of social determinants of health that jurisdictions across the
globe need to continuously address especially when formulating health promotion initiatives
(World Health Organization, 2008). One area is the daily living conditions that constitute
determinants such as fair employment, social protection, healthy physical environments and fair
access to healthcare.
The other one relates to the distribution of resources, power, and money with
determinants such as healthy working conditions, political empowerment, resource distribution,
equity in access of health programs, economic inequalities, and gender equity is the major social
determinants considerations. All these social determinants of health have the potential of
impacting health initiatives and outcomes in one way or another. Since health inequities by and
large emanate from societal conditions in which people find themselves in at birth and continue
to live, work and age in, they are entirely unacceptable and deserve to be addressed if equality
and equity in health outcomes is to be achieved across different society setups. Jurisdiction
across the globe including Australia ought to lay formidable strategies to enhance equality and
ease of access to resources in areas such as early childhood development, education,