Alliance for Healthy Cities

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The Alliance for Healthy Cities (AFHC) is a cooperative international alliance aimed at protecting and enhancing the health and health care of city dwellers. It is composed of groups of cities, urban districts and other organizations from countries around the world in exchanging information to achieve the goal through a health promotion approach called Healthy Cities . The chair city for the alliance is Ichikawa, Japan. [1]

Contents

The alliance and its members work in favour of the healthy city, defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as "one that is continually creating and improving those physical and social environments and expanding those community resources which enable people to mutually support each other in performing all the functions of life and in developing to their maximum potential". [2]

History

AFHC third conference nobori in Ichikawa, Chiba in October 2008

The first international declaration that promoted the concepts underlying healthy cities, the Alma Ata Declaration, was adopted at the International Conference for Primary Health Care, jointly convened by the WHO and UNICEF in Almaty (formerly Alma-Ata), presently in Kazakhstan, 6–12 September 1978. [3] The primary health care strategy endorsed and targeted health for all the people of the world by the year 2000. [4]

Various discussions have taken place since then. Trevor Hancock and Leonard Duhl promoted the term "Healthy Cities" in consultation with the WHO: [5]

Economic development has brought comfort and convenience to many people in the industrialized world, but in its wake are pollution, new health problems, blighted urban landscapes and social isolation. Growing numbers of the dispossessed are also being left on the sidelines as the disparity between rich and poor grows. In an effort to remedy these ills, people from disparate backgrounds in thousands of communities are joining together with government agencies under the Healthy Cities/Healthy Communities banner to improve the quality of life in their towns and cities.

At the First International Conference on Health Promotion in 1986, the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion was adopted that presented actions to achieve healthy life for all people by the year 2000 and beyond. [6]

Following a second international conference on health promotion at Adelaide in 1988 and a third at Sundsvall in 1991, and twenty years after the Alma Ata Declaration, the Fourth International Conference on Health Promotion held in July 1997 in Jakarta adopted the new Jakarta Declaration: "New Players for a New Era - Leading Health Promotion into the 21st Century". It came at a critical moment in the development of international PHC strategies. [7]

Timeline

List of members

See also

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Healthy city</span> Concept in urban design for health

Healthy city is a term used in public health and urban design to stress the impact of policy on human health. It is a municipality that continually improves on a physical and a social level until environmental and pathological conditions are reached establishing an acceptable morbidity rate for the population. Its modern form derives from a World Health Organization (WHO) initiative on Healthy Cities and Villages in 1986, but has a history dating back to the mid 19th century. The term was developed in conjunction with the European Union, but rapidly became international as a way of establishing healthy public policy at the local level through health promotion. It emphasises the multi-dimensionality of health as laid out in WHO's constitution and, more recently, the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion. An alternative term is Healthy Communities, or Municipios saludables in parts of Latin America.

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Primary health care (PHC) is a whole-of-society approach to effectively organise and strengthen national health systems to bring services for health and wellbeing closer to communities.

Declaration of Alma-Ata was adopted at the International Conference on Primary Health Care (PHC), Almaty, Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union 6–12 September 1978. It expressed the need for urgent action by all governments, all health and development workers, and the world community to protect and promote the health of all people. It was the first international declaration underlining the importance of primary health care. The primary health care approach has since then been accepted by member countries of the World Health Organization (WHO) as the key to achieving the goal of "Health For All", but only in developing countries at first. This applied to all other countries five years later. The Alma-Ata Declaration of 1978 emerged as a major milestone of the twentieth century in the field of public health, and it identified primary health care as the key to the attainment of the goal of "Health For All" around the globe.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion</span> International agreement signed at the First International Conference on Health Promotion

The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion is the name of an international agreement signed at the First International Conference on Health Promotion, organized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and held in Ottawa, Canada, in November 1986. It launched a series of actions among international organizations, national governments and local communities to achieve the goal of "Health For All" by the year 2000 and beyond through better health promotion.

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References

  1. "Definition, ABOUT THE ALLIANCE". Alliance for Healthy Cities.
  2. World Health Organization. Health Promotion Glossary. Geneva, 1998.
  3. "Declaration of Alma-Ata" (PDF). WHO. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-02-05.
  4. WHO, Review of 40 years of primary health care implementation at country level, December 2019, Executive summary Background, page i, Setting a goal of the attainment by all peoples of the world by the year 2000 at the Wayback Machine (archived 2022-01-20)
  5. "Healthy cities, healthy children, Leonard Duhl and Trevor Hancock". UNICEF.
  6. "Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion" (PDF). WHO. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-07-27.
  7. "Jakarta Declaration on Leading Health, Promotion into the 21st Century" (PDF). Alliance for Healthy Cities.