Why Health Promotion Needs to Change

Abstract

If you ask most health professionals why they do what they do, they invariably speak of being of service. And being of service, for population health workers, becomes ever more meaningful as our work touches ever more lives. To wit, “Kaizen,” a Japanese term meaning “change for better,” sits shoulder to shoulder with our life’s purpose. Health promotion professionals are high performers getting great results but we need to start working on our work. What would it take to increase our impact by 50%? And when we change our processes to accomplish that, what would we change next to get another 50% improvement? Only by stepping back and examining our processes can we see the time and motion required to make what’s working now work better and be more accessible to more people next time.