Health Promotion as an action and research field for Social Work: promoting health equity trough mobilizing local health assets

“Poor die earlier”, say health reports. But “Health for All in the 21st century”, says Agenda 21 from WHO. So why there is still observable this gap in health and how can it be reduced? One of the primary goals of... [ view full abstract ]

“Poor die earlier”, say health reports. But “Health for All in the 21st century”, says Agenda 21 from WHO. So why there is still observable this gap in health and how can it be reduced? One of the primary goals of actual WHOs strategies is, to reduce health inequalities and to promote health equity. The actual crisis of welfare states, the rising savings in the social and health sector and current demographic trends bring us to a reflection about how we can deal with this issue.
Also in wealthy European welfare states there is a strong connection between health perception, health (or ill) status, life-expectancy and the so called social determinants of health, the social resources and conditions, which have a significant impact on human’s health. Social inequality leads to health inequality and vice versa. Health equity becomes a task for all policies (health in all policies) and promoting health equity has to become a main goal for Social Work Research and Practice.

This research project deals with the issue of health (in)-equity in South Tyrol, a trilingual border region in Northern Italy. It is a community-based participatory resarch project, which has the aim to show how to mobilize local health assets for health equity. As community-based participatory health research has the intention to explore the causes of health problems and to develop strategies for action it is an approach which is especially suitable for developing action strategies for promoting health equity.

The paper presentation will give an overview about the theoretical background, the methodology and some first outcomes of this research project.

Keywords: Community-based Health Promotion, Participatory Research, Health (In-)Equity