An Introduction to Community and Primary Health Care

Health promotion is a broad and complex process that overarches all health strategy related to primary health care, public health, population health and community health. It is often an overtly political and policy-driven process that includes types of health education activity such as ‘radical’ health education (Clavier & de Leeuw, 2013; Green et al., 2019). When it comes to primary health care program planning and evaluation, the terms health promotion and health education are also often used interchangeably but this is less of a problem than already stated. Health promotion approaches, often by default, include health education interventions. Reflecting this, many ‘health’ planning and evaluation tools and models incorporate both health promotion and health education processes (Raingruber 2014; Whitehead & Irvine, 2010). This chapter aims to highlight good practice as it applies to essential health promotion and health education programs required to demonstrate effective process. It does so by presenting these in a logical and sequential process and offers an overview of models and frameworks for guiding this process.