This book's central focus is to provide academics, students, policy-makers, and practitioners with a unique insight into a wide variety of perspectives on settings-based health promotion. It offers clarity amidst different interpretations and ideological understandings of what applying a settings-based approach means. Emphasis is given to a salutogenic focus, exploring how the creation of wellbeing and fostering of potential in settings to best enable individuals and populations to flourish implies that the setting itself must be the entry point for health promotion. Building on this, the text explores how the settings approach to health promotion strives for changes in the structure and ethos of the setting – detailing how changes and developments in people's health and health behavior are easier to achieve if health promoters focus on settings rather than solely on individuals.
The book comprises 15 chapters organized in three sections:
- In Part I, Evolution, Foundations and Key Principles of the Settings-Based Approach, the first four chapters present the determinants, theoretical basis, and generic commonalities that are consistent over various settings initiatives and formulate the grounds for the settings-based health promotion approach.
- In Part II, Applying the Settings-Based Approach to Key Settings, Chapters 5-13 introduce the key settings initiatives – both traditional and non-traditional (new and contemporary) – with their developments and specific features.
- In Part III, Gaia – The Ultimate Setting for Health Promotion, the last two chapters consider the settings approach in the context of future challenges and explore possible directions for further development.
Handbook of Settings-Based Health Promotion has novel information and perspectives on the topic that provide readers with up-to-date specialist knowledge and application of global developments to develop and enhance a common understanding and generate new thinking in relation to contemporary settings. This timely tome will engage the academic community in the fields of health promotion and public health including students, teaching staff, and researchers. Additionally, it is a useful resource for policy-makers and practitioners in these fields.
Sami Kokko is an Associate Professor in Health Promotion and the Director of Research Center for Health Promotion at the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences in the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He is a member of the Nordic Health Promotion Research Network and the Global Working Group on Healthy Settings at the International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE).
Sami’s main research interests are settings-based health promotion, especially in sports club settings, and physical activity/sports-related topics. He has worked at the University of Jyväskylä for almost twenty years and his publications have contributed not only to science, but also to health and physical activity promotion policy and practice.
Michelle Baybutt is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Sustainable Health and Justice, Co-director of the Healthy and Sustainable Settings Unit (HSSU) and Prisons Strand Lead for the Centre for Criminal Justice Research Partnerships at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. She is a member of the Global Working Group on Healthy Settings at the International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE) and is Editor of the International Journal of Health Promotion and Education.
Michelle’s academic expertise linking health promotion practice with research and knowledge exchange forms an academic narrative around prisons as a setting for fostering health and wellbeing; notably, the duality of governance/prison health systems and implementation of sustainable public health interventions. Michelle has extensive health promotion and public health expertise working with people in prisons and those with experience of prison in the wider community. She is committed to improving the health and opportunities of people who are socially excluded or marginalised, and to addressing health inequalities and social injustice.
