Promoting health: intervention strategies from social and behavioral research

This report, released by the Division of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention within the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences, asserts that behavioral and social interventions such as health promotion and disease prevention offer great promise to reduce disease morbidity and mortality in the United States, but as yet their potential has not been recognized or tapped by the federal government. Two overarching recommendations are the need to address generic social and behavioral determinants of health rather than the clinical causes of disease and death, and the need to intervene at multiple levels of influence including the individual, interpersonal, institutional, community, and policy levels. Seven recommendations for intervention strategies, nine recommendations for research, and three recommendations for funding are offered.