Abstract
Health promotion is a set of strategies for positively influencing health through a range of individual, community-based, and population interventions. Despite international recognition that gender is a primary determinant of health and that gender roles can negatively affect health, the health promotion field has not yet articulated how to integrate gender theoretically or practically into its vision. For example, interventions often fail to critically consider women’s or men’s diverse social locations, gender-based power relations, or sex-based differences in health status. Yet without such analyses, interventions can result in the accommodation or exploitation of gender relations that disadvantage women and compromise their health. In this paper, we seek to ignite an agenda for health promotion for women. We discuss the need for a conceptual framework that includes a sex-gender-diversity analysis and critically considers ‘what counts’ as health promotion to guide the development and implementation of evidence-based practice. We also consider how innovative knowledge translation practices, technology developments and action research can advance this agenda in ways that foster the participation of a wide range of stakeholders.
Key words: Health promotion, women’s health, evidence-based practice, research
Résumé
La promotion de la santé est un ensemble de stratégies qui visent à influencer positivement la santé au moyen d’une gamme d’interventions individuelles, collectives ou axées sur une population. On reconnaît à l’échelle internationale que le sexe est l’un des principaux déterminants de la santé et que les rôles sexuels peuvent nuire à la santé. Pourtant, les intervenants en promotion de la santé n’ont pas encore énoncé comment intégrer les sexospécificités dans leur vision, ni en théorie, ni en pratique. Par exemple, on omet souvent, dans les interventions, de tenir compte de façon critique de l’écart entre les femmes et les hommes dans l’échelle sociale, des relations de pouvoir fondées sur le sexe ou des différences dans l’état de santé selon le sexe. Sans de telles analyses, ces interventions peuvent entraîner des accommodements ou une exploitation des relations hommes-femmes qui désavantagent les femmes et qui compromettent leur santé. Dans cet article, nous voulons dresser un plan de promotion de la santé des femmes. Nous expliquons le besoin d’un cadre conceptuel incluant une analyse de la diversité sexuelle-sexospécifique et un examen critique de „ ce qui compte ” dans la promotion de la santé pour orienter la création et la mise en œuvre de pratiques fondées sur les preuves. Nous examinons aussi comment les pratiques novatrices d’application des connaissances, les développements technologiques et la recherche-action peuvent appuyer ce plan d’action de manière à favoriser la participation d’un vaste éventail d’acteurs du milieu.
Mots clés: promotion de la santé, santé des femmes, pratique fondée sur les résultats, recherche
Footnotes
Conflict of interest: None to declare.
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