Health Promotion and Community Engagement

Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over their health and its determinants, and thereby improve their health. Health promotion is a core component of public health practice, and in this unit students will advance their knowledge of health promotion by evaluating theoretical approaches, examining the models of health behaviour on which many health promotion strategies are based, and selecting appropriate health promotion strategies. The emphasis in this unit of study will be on taking a theoretically informed approach to interpret, justify and select health promotion strategies to achieve sustainable health gains across a range of global and local settings. Students will develop advanced knowledge of working with socially and culturally diverse groups, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through taking a community engagement and place-based approach to health promotion practice.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this unit, students will be able to:

1. Review and critique major approaches to health promotion applied to contemporary health promotion challenges, globally and locally;
2. Critically appraise models of behaviour change applied to health promotion strategies;
3. Conceptually map and propose appropriate health promotion strategies in a range of settings; and
4. Articulate principles of community engagement used in health promotion and demonstrate how these are applied in practice when working with socially and culturally diverse population groups, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.