Certificate in Health Promotion

Define health promotion as enabling individuals and communities to improve health and well being through education, behavior change, policy development, and environmental change within social, economical and environmental determinants.

Explore health promotion concepts such as empowerment, participation, equity, intersectoral action, and sustainability, and learn how enabling communities drives ownership and reduces health disparities.

Explore health promotion strategies and interventions—health education, behavior change, environmental change, policy development—and examine examples like vaccination campaigns, healthy eating and physical activity programs, tobacco control, and workplace health initiatives.

The social cognitive theory explains behavior through personal factors, environmental factors, and behavior itself. It applies to behaviors including dietary change, physical activity, and medication adherence, despite its measurement challenges.

The theory of planned behavior extends the theory of reasoned action by linking intention to attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control for health behaviors, including condom use.

Explore the transtheoretical model of behavior change, detailing stages—precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and termination—and the need to tailor interventions to readiness, while noting relapse and social and environmental factors.

Explore the steps involved in planning, implementing, and assessing health promotion programs. Learn to assess needs, apply evidence-based practices, develop logic models, and ensure sustainability.

Identify health problems and the affected population through needs assessment and data review, then plan, implement, and evaluate interventions using evidence-based practices and behavior-change theories.

Explore logic models in health promotion to map inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes, align with goals, and communicate with stakeholders and funders for sustainable, evidence-based interventions.

Understand the foundations of health communication, including social cognitive theory, health belief model, and transtheoretical model. Apply channels, message design, ethics, and evaluation to promote healthy behaviors and health outcomes.

Explore mass media, interpersonal, and new media channels in health communication, noting strengths and limitations for the target audience. Design clear, concise, culturally appropriate messages and pre-test with the community.

Learn ethical principles in health communication, including respect for autonomy, informed consent, and confidentiality, and ensure truthful messages. Apply these ethics to public health to promote behaviors and health literacy.

Explore how epidemiology studies distribution and determinants of health and disease, identify health needs, and inform interventions using incidence, prevalence, relative risk, odds ratio, correlation coefficients, and study designs.

Explore measures of association, including relative risk, odds ratio, and correlation, and bias, confounding, and study designs—descriptive, cross-sectional, case-control, and cohort—for health promotion.

Empower communities through collaborative health promotion, creating supportive environments for easy, healthy choices; learn precede and proceed models, including policy and partnerships that drive impact.

Explore global health promotion to reduce disparities and advance health equity worldwide through education, advocacy, community engagement, health communication, policy change, and case studies.

Explore how the sustainable development goals, especially SDG 3, drive global health promotion and health equity by addressing social determinants like education, poverty, and access to care.

Examine case studies of global health promotion programs, learn best practices, and anticipate future directions including telemedicine, mobile health, artificial intelligence, and cross-sector collaboration to address social determinants of health.

Explore how health policy is shaped by stakeholders and advocacy, and analyze case studies on tobacco control and access to care to improve health equity.

Explore strategies for advocating for health policy, including coalition building, data-driven messaging, engaging policymakers, and mobilizing grassroots campaigns to improve health equity and outcomes.

Define health equity and social determinants of health, examine how they shape health outcomes and disparities, explore examples and causes, and outline strategies health promotion professionals use to advance equity.

Explore why health equity matters for all populations, highlighting reduced costs, social stability, and better outcomes, and learn strategies like addressing social determinants, improving access, health literacy, and equity-focused policies.