A framework for health promoting emergency departments

Since 1986, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been advocating for the health sector to move increasingly in a health promotion direction, beyond its responsibility for providing clinical and curative services (WHO, 1986). Some Emergency Departments (EDs) have partially achieved this through providing patient health information, screening and early intervention programs, injury prevention and asthma education. While EDs are a suitable setting for health promotion, they are grounded in a medical paradigm where most of the staff are educated to think exclusively of relation care. As such, a significant organizational shift is required for EDs to be more inclusive of health promotion principles. Following a comprehensive literature review, a theoretical framework was developed for the Health Promoting Emergency Departments Program (HPEDP). It describes the opportunities for health promotion in EDs through combining the 'strategies for health promotion' with the 'spectrum of health and disease'. This forms a matrix to enable health development, primary prevention and secondary prevention interventions to be planned in EDs. The framework is a tool to support the development of coordinate and comprehensive health promotion programs and to avoid the use of isolated victim-blaming strategies. Beyond EDs, planners in other health care institutions may also find the framework useful-particularly those settings where staff health promotion training and experience is limited.