Ottawa Charter- All you need to know !

What is Ottawa Charter?

The very 1^st international conference on health promotion was held on Ottawa on 1^st November, 1986 which presented a charter for action known as Ottawa Charter.
The objective/aim of the conference was to take action for achieving Health for All by the year 2000.
This conference was primarily focused on the needs of the developing nations. However, it incorporated the health needs of the entire global arena.
It is one of the major international conferences till date which has explored major health promotion strategies and issues
It is also considered as a milestone event in global health
The conference took place after the Alma Ata Conference on Primary Health Care held on 1978. Furthermore, it was backed up by other international conferences on health promotion held in different parts of the world like Adelaide, Sundsvall, Jakarta, Mexico, Bangkok and Nairobi.
Ottawa Charter gave rise to certain determinants necessary for good health condition, three basic strategies for health promotion and five areas for priority actions.
The charter identifies certain determinants which are essential for good health condition. These prerequisites are: peace, shelter, education, income, food, sustainable resources, stable ecosystem and social justice and equity.
Basic strategies for health promotion includes: advocacy for health, enabling people to achieve their fullest potential health and mediated and coordinated actions among all the relevant stakeholders.

Priority areas for action towards health promotion identified by Ottawa charter includes six areas. They are: build healthy public policy, create supportive environment, strengthen community actions, develop personal skills, and reorient health services and moving into the future. Further explanation of these areas are:
Build healthy public policies:
- Healthy public policy merges diverse and complementary approaches for health promotion
- It keeps health as a major agenda among policy makers in all areas and all levels
- It includes legislation, fiscal measures, taxation and organizational change
- It involves identification of the impediments for adopting healthy public policies and identifies the ways of removing these obstacles.

Creating supportive environment:
- There is inextricable link between human beings health and their environment
- The way society functions should help create a better health for the people.
- As health cannot be separated from the environmental factors, protection and maintenance of both natural and built environment along with the preservation of natural resources is very necessary for health promotion
- Thus reciprocal maintenance of the environment is the major guiding principle

Strengthen community actions
- Health promotion works through effective community actions for setting priorities, making decisions, planning and implementing actions.
- Its core idea entails the empowerment of the communities through community participation, involvement and engagement in matters of health.
- It develops flexible system for strengthening public participation
- The objective is to empower and strengthen communities to improve health promotion and its outcome.

Develop personal skills
- Health promotion supports personal and social development by providing information, education and enhancement of life skills.
- Enabling people to learn to prepare themselves to cope up with health events.
- Developing personal skills will prepare and increase the chances of an individual to control their own health through their own initiatives.

Reorient health services
- Reorient health service includes shifting towards a system that focuses on health promotion rather than curative aspects
- Health services should be connected / interlinked with physical, social, political and economic environments.
- Health services should be oriented in such a way that it fulfills the need and demand of the communities for their better health.
- Focus on need of an individual includes need in a holistic aspect rather than limiting it to just injury and diseases.

Moving into the future:
- People create their health in a setting of their everyday life where they perform their daily activities.
- Health is created by taking decisions about own health and having control over one’s life circumstances.
- Thus, caring each other, holism and ecological aspects are the essential issues while developing health promotional strategies
- The major guiding principle is that men and women should become equal partners in all phases of planning, implementation and evaluation of health promotion activities.

Ottawa charter was created more than three decades ago and currently different countries bases its health promotion using these action areas suggested by the charter. One example of such country is Australia which has the foundation of health promotion based on this charter.
It aimed to reduce inequity in health targeting the most vulnerable groups like people with disabilities, poor, diseased, unemployed and socially backward and disadvantaged families/communities.

References