Creating health promoting settings

The Healthy Settings movement came out of the WHO Health for All strategy in 1980. The idea has been refined over the years by calling for the creation of supportive environments with a focus on settings for health and emphasizing the value of settings for implementing comprehensive strategies and providing an infrastructure for health promotion. At the most recent Global Conference on Health Promotion in 2016, the Shanghai Declaration further expanded the role of health promotion in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). At present, various settings are used to facilitate the improvement of public health throughout the world, such as cities, islands, workplaces, schools, communities, families, and markets.

Action to promote health through different settings can take many forms. Actions often involve some level of organizational development, including changes to the physical environment or to the organizational structure, administration and management. Settings can also be used to promote health as they are vehicles to reach individuals, to gain access to services, and to synergistically bring together the interactions throughout the wider community.