Education | Research | Cure | Health Promotion
Health promotion is one of the biggest challenges of our time; its significance rivals that of the sepsis in the days of Ignaz Semmelweis. The general wellbeing of the population, the accessibility of resources needed for a healthy life, and the population’s health literacy are all determining factors for a society; factors that have an impact on culture and the economy as well. In order to achieve improvement in these aspects, people need to be provided with reliable, high-quality information. We, as practicing health professionals and students of the field are responsible for the health and health improvement of our society.
On February 21 2019, the Senate of Semmelweis University unanimously decided to lead this initiative, and established the Semmelweis Health Promotion Center. The aim of the Center is to become a health scene that promotes health consciousness at all of its operational levels whilst expanding and developing its toolkit necessary to achieve that purpose.
We are also devising methods for the University, a key institution of health promotion, to take a more active role in society. In order to achieve improvements in the fields of oncology, as well as cardiovascular and mental health, meaningful knowledge transfer is needed on a societal level. The Center proposes efficient and swift educational, scientific and organizational measures that institutionalize health promotion at Semmelweis University.
Our main objectives involve short-, mid-, and long-term goals in four key fields: science, education, organizational development, and communication. In the field of science, we aim to launch and continue long-term health promotion research programs that focus on the study population’s health literacy and behaviour, and on the efficiency of applied interventions. These programs will also be facilitated by international cooperation. In the field of education, the short-term objective is introducing new elective course units accessible for students of various levels, in close coordination with the Department of Public Health (Faculty of Medicine).
We also aim to evaluate and develop the preventive and health promotion aspects of the obligatory under- and postgraduate course structure. These steps can strengthen the preventive approach of our students, create an educational culture spanning different faculties, and facilitate interdisciplinary thinking. With regard to organizational development, our goal is to implement a long-term health promotion program at the University. The health maintenance of students and staff is supported by the main pillars of the program: health promotion, sport events, health screening, and conferences. The program reaches beyond a way of thinking sheerly based on diagnostic categories. Our objective is health promotion on a societal level, which requires creating an adequate setting at the University and among the Hungarian population.
It is important to stress the innovative, even internationally novel nature of our approach, since we aim to implement health promotion and integrated prevention at ‘the workplace’, in the framework of activity management and organizational culture development. Our task is to enable the dissemination of evidence-based information by the University, encompassing several divisive questions pertaining to healthy living.
