Developing health promotion education: Mainstreaming or acknowledging tensions in an evolving discipline?

Aims: To contribute to development of global frameworks for health promotion education, by means of constructive criticism of the Galway Consensus Conference Statement (GCCS), and, furthermore, to substantiate that such frameworks must transcend political trends if they are to contribute to the ongoing development of health promotion both as a discipline and as a professional practice. This article is based on a workshop on competence domains in health promotion, held at the Sixth Nordic Health Promotion Research Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, 20—22 August 2009. Methods: The GCCS’s delimitations of health, health promotion, and health promotion ethics is analysed and contrasted with the authors’ ongoing experiences from a master’s programme in health promotion. Results: Three important limitations in the GCCS are identified: the GCCS does not promote perspectives on health other than absence of disease, defines no role for health promotion other than disease prevention, and includes no perspectives on ethical challenges for practitioners. The examples from the master’s programme illustrate how and why these delimitations are problematic. Conclusions: Despite its limitations the GCCS has the potential to set a global agenda for health promotion education because of its emphasis on domains of core competencies in health promotion practice. To further this potential the GCCS’ context of use should be changed from mainstreaming health promotion into a technology for disease prevention, to enabling dialog between contributors to health promotion with differing political and scientific ideals. Such dialog must relate to tensions and ambiguities experienced by health promotion practitioners in real-life situations.