Population strategy for health promotion contributing to reconstruct peaceful and active aging society

Abstract

Background: In Japan, there are strong continuous demands to build a sustainable social security system to ensure a society where everyone can live with a sense of safety and security. These efforts will work toward establishing an affluent and vigorous older society.

Contents: It is important to accumulate evidence of health promotion, specifically of population strategies for all people. In practicing population strategy, comprehensive interventions use the dissemination of health information via media outlets, health education for individuals and groups, and environmental improvement through community empowerment. This should be implemented for the entire population or for the targeted populations with higher risk of contracting diseases. For population strategies in communities, it is better to develop and implement intervention strategies based on the logic models proposed by the Cochrane Public Health Group.

Conclusion: Two important issues must be resolved to achieve societal benefits from health promotion. First, processes need to be established towards the practical use of information of health promotion; i.e., accumulation, transfer, and use of evidence of health promotion via population strategy. The second issue is to restructure the academic environment to enable interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies for health promotion. Particularly for the latter, there are strong hopes that scientific organizations related with health promotion will cooperate and collaborate towards establishing the Japanese Council of Scientific Unions for Health Promotion as a new academic organization.