Introduction to Part I: The Health Promotion Curriculum

Abstract

This section focuses on the curriculum for health promotion, and in so doing, it highlights the ongoing challenge of differentiating health promotion as a discrete discipline. This section includes six chapters. Three of the chapters are describing initiatives, and the other three chapters outline some of the issues and challenges facing the provision of health promotion education and the importance of close engagement between academic staff, stakeholders and students during health promotion course reviews.

Each chapter points to the importance and necessity of a skilled health promotion workforce. Each of the universities providing an education in health promotion seeks to differentiate it from other healthcare courses that often sit alongside them in faculties of health. Many of the debates in this section mimic those mechanisms by which other professionals assert and exercise authority: the need to develop expert or specialist skills and knowledge and the establishment of certified levels of competence.

What marks out all these health promotion courses is their commonality of purpose. This is not only in forging future professionals who share values and views about the ways that health can be improved but also in the notions of knowledge, knowing and knowledge sharing that create that shared identity of health promotion.