Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health. It moves beyond a focus on individual behaviour towards a wide range of social and environmental interventions. As a core function of public health, health promotion supports governments, communities and individuals to cope with and address health challenges. This is accomplished by building healthy public policies, creating supportive environments, and strengthening community action and personal skills. In addition to ongoing advocacy efforts, the emphasis of health promotion in the Western Pacific Region is currently on building health promotion capacity (financing and infrastructure), urban health (including healthy cities and health equity), healthy settings (including schools and workplaces) and healthy islands.