Using health promotion frameworks to effectively address health inequalities

Introduction: Health promotion frameworks have been criticised as, paradoxically, exacerbating health inequalities. First, critics assert that while the roles of institutional, economic, social and environmental factors in health inequalities are recognised by health promotion workers, strategy implementation invariably concentrates on the relatively ‘soft targets’ of biological and behavioural risk factors. Such selective strategy implementation is said to promote the health of the rich, who are less constrained by structural factors, much more than it does the poor.