VALUE-BASED EVIDENCES TO FACE THE NEW CHALLENGES OF HEALTH PROMOTION IN A SUSTAINABLE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

Thirty years ago, starting from a new awareness of the limits of biomedical power and healthcareservices to solve all population‟ health problems, the Ottawa Conference coined a New PublicHealth by defining Health Promotion (HP) as “the process of enabling people to increase controlover and to improve their health and well-being”. Since then and over the next 30 years, severalprograms have been developed all over the world to translate HP concepts into practical actions andmany health successes have been achieved as well. Nowadays, even if the global health context hasstrongly changed, the original principles of HP still provide a solid ground for action, being thecommunity engagement and empowerment of women and men still at the heart of any healthstrategy, in a shared responsibility of all society‟s sectors approach. However, since now HPpromotion efforts have been directed toward priority health problems in a issue- settings-basedapproach, but in a sustainable and ethical prospective this will be not enough now: a deeperattention on effectiveness is request and an evidence- and value-based HP approach is needed tosupport the Public Health community and the policy-making, including the new challenges relatedto Public Health Genomics.