Health Promotion Practice and Public Health: Challenge for the 1990s

The issue of practice skills arose in the course of a process evaluation of the Heart Smart North Shore (HSNS) project in British Columbia. We created a Think Tank of researchers and community practitioners to make recommendations for improvement of our skills. These recommendations differed according to different values for health and opinions on how to create health in the community. Because the site reviewers of the HSNS project were clear this was a disease prevention project and not a community development initiative, HSNS’s orientation to skill development after the Think Tank moved toward the Precede/Proceed model, the Transtheoretical model and social marketing approaches. The Health Unit has now been restructured into multidisciplinary service teams which must focus on population health, evidence-based practice and the social determinants of health, and thus need to consider health promotion from a community development perspective and empowerment model. We suggest that learning and the development of staff and community volunteers should be seen as a continuous and reflective process that takes place at the individual, community and organizational level.