RHP&EO is the electronic journal of the International
Union for Health Promotion and Education
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My favorite resources for my work in heath promotion in the AmericasHelena E. Restrepo, consultant in Health Promotion, Columbia Restrepo, H. E. My favorite resources for my work in heath promotion in the Americas, Reviews of Health Promotion and Education Online, 2004. URL: 7/index.htm. INTRODUCTIONI am a physician with a Masters degree in public health and with training in epidemiology. After working 18 years in my country, Colombia, in teaching and research as professor in universities and as manager and administrator in the public health sector, I was appointed as staff member to the Pan American Health Organization of the World Health Organization; (PAHO/WHO). My early responsibilities at PAHO were in technical cooperation in epidemiology, prevention and the control of non-communicable diseases; later, I was appointed as chief of Health of the Adults and Health Promotion Programs; it became the new Division of Health Promotion and Protection (HPP) and I then became the Director of HPP. In the different academic and administrative jobs that I have had, I have always used strategies that today are well recognized as strategies of Health Promotion (HP). Among them, I privileged community participation, comprehensive and integrated approaches and policy analysis. Moreover, as a public health worker of an underdeveloped country, I always had sensibility towards the social, economic, cultural and political problems of our peoples in the context of Latin America. In the last years after retiring from PAHO, I have been working as private consultant providing advice and guidance on programs and projects at the national and international levels, with an emphasis on HP theory and practice.Thus, to identify only five favorite resources for my work in HP was not an easy task for me, since I have had during all these years many wonderful sources of inspiration. Among them I can identify personal contacts with community leaders and politicians; excellent papers and documents as well as valuable knowledge of experts. But as the request was to identify only five, therefore I will try to be as selective as possible in this task. PERSONAL CONTACT WITH PEOPLEThe contact and exchange of experiences with people-persons and groups-was and continue being a very valuable source of sound information and knowledge for my work in HP. I am convinced that direct contact with people is the only way to know the social situation and problems of the more excluded and vulnerable groups, object of our work in public health and especially in HP. For example, to share experiences and knowledge with the protagonists of communities and local governments of the healthy cities and healthy municipalities of Spain (Andalucia and Valencia) and of Latin America convinced me of the real possibility of implementing effective HP activities at the local level, in order to help groups and communities to find a way to achieve better living conditions and better health. Social participation is a bottomless source of experience.MEETING THE EXPERTSPersonal relationship with experts and thinkers of HP was a crucial resource in my first years as Director of HPP Division at PAHO, in order to implement the programmatic orientations of HP as well as to offer technical cooperation to country members of PAHO. Among the first group of experts that I met and whose ideas about HP I was exposed to were Ron Draper, Ron Labonté, Milton Terris, Pekka Puska and Alfred McAlister; all of them gave us clear concepts about HP theory and that was definitive to strengthen our capacity for assuming the challenges of the new Division. I am especially grateful to the late Milton Terris, wonderful friend, who gave me highly needed technical support through his sound discussions and papers. The same can be said about the workshops that we organized for technical staff of HPP with Michael McGinnis or Trevor Hanckock; and about a workshop organized at Yale University by professor Lowell Levin, where I had the great opportunity of listen to and learn about healthy public policies from Nancy Milio, John Ashton and Erio Ziglio. In a more recent phase of my work, I continued receiving the product of valuable experiences and knowledge of other experts like Ilona Kickbush, Réal Lacombe, Len Duhl, Michel O'Neill, Nina Wallerstein, José Antonio Infiesta, Carlos Alvarez-Dardet, Concha Colomer, Luis Andrés López, Lise Renaud, Mauricio Gómez, and many other colleagues. I know that as I had this kind of opportunities to learn from these specific experts, there are today excellent professionals all over the world that can offer the same advice to new workers in HP. Fortunately the number of HP experts grows every day, and a considerable number of professionals are now talking, writing and producing excellent materials. And in Latin America, we are fortunate to have a very active group of them. For me the contact as well as and exchange of experiences and knowledge with many of them is still one of the most valuable resource for continuously expanding my knowledge in HP.CHARTERS, DECLARATIONSI think that a very important resource of HP are the declarations, charters and other resolutions coming out of international meetings and conferences. Obviously the most cited and used is the Ottawa Charter. For our work in the context of Latin America and the Caribbean, two perhaps less internationally known but extremely important documents are the Declaration of Santafé of Bogotá ( Declaración de Santafé de Bogotá, 1992) and the Caribbean Charter for Health Promotion, 1993. In the first one, participants of 21 countries met to discuss for the first time in our sub-continent the principles and applications of HP, focusing on the need for equity in health in the region. Even if for some they just seem empty words, I think that all the different world declarations-Adelaide, Sundsval, Jakarta, Mexico and the future ones-are fundamental inputs for HP work.THE HEALTH PROMOTION SCIENTIFIC LITERATUREAn excellent resource for HP is the abundant scientific literature in the field, including the famous Lalonde from Canada (1974) and the WHO Report " A Call for Action." (1987). The reading of more than 700 papers and documents that I did between 1994 and 1995 in order to select a number of them to be published by PAHO, was a wonderful opportunity; it allowed me to review a great deal of theoretical elements, methods and results of HP implementation. The group of papers that finally were selected by us (four reviewers) constitutes PAHO scientific publication No. 557 (1996),"An Anthology of Health Promotion". I believe it still is a very useful publication for understanding the wide scope of HP, and it has been very utilized in Latin America and the Caribbean.A variety of other books has been very useful in my professional life as public health worker. Some of them are books with historic value in the field of public health. One example of them are the books of Paulo Freire that even though they were written several years before the starting of the new movement of HP, still have an enormous value for the educational sciences and for looking for well-being of poor people. Talking about books of HP, some chapters of them are so good that could be considered indispensable for HP professionals. I continually go back to them. However, I do not feel comfortable selecting only a restricted number of titles in this respect and, I prefer to say that we are very lucky now, given the amount of published literature related to HP that exists to support our work. Even more important for us in Latin America is the fact that over the last years much more books in Spanish and Portuguese are available than it was the case before. The fact is that HP is fashionable today, and the production of papers, documents and books is overwhelming. The challenge is thus to make sure to read and consult them for the benefit of the populations and communities we work for that need to improve their living conditions and health. CONCLUSIONTo finish this brief review, I would like to say that to work in HP has been a true joy for me and that every day I appreciate even more the different resources that I have been able to access during my long-time work in the fascinating field of Health Promotion.REFERENCES
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