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Healthy marketplaces: insights into policy, practice and potential for health promotion

The World Health Organization (WHO) has been implementing the Healthy Marketplace initiative in the market setting of developing countries since 1997. This initiative forms part of the Healthy Cities strategy and is reinforced through the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion. The WHO Food Safety Division has indicated that every city in the WHO Healthy City program will eventually also have a Healthy Marketplace program. This is despite the absence of any published guidelines for facilitating program implementation, a clearly articulated Healthy Marketplace concept, and a dearth of meaningful program evaluations. This thesis set out to explore the views and experiences of in-country stakeholders involved in a Vietnamese Healthy Marketplace program. It also set out to examine the roles and perceptions of experts engaged in the design and delivery of programs across the developing world. Through an iterative and post-positivist research methodology, this inquiry collected and analysed data from five key sources: documents, detailed questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and observations and reflections. The findings revealed that various and even conflicting program concepts and aims existed across and within groups, having significant implications for practice. The settings approach was not the dominant approach to health promotion in the Vietnamese market, but rather a 'top-down' topic-based approach dominated as the mechanism for program delivery. Consequently, numerous challenges have been identified for Healthy Marketplace policy and practice. The challenges are prefaced on the adoption of a settings approach, and include the need for : market communities to set their own agendas; the program target audience to be redefined; increased power sharing across stakeholders; the re-education of professionals; the sharing of knowledge; and the adequate resourcing of Healthy Marketplace programs / Master of Science (Hons)

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/182133
Date January 2003
CreatorsHolmes, Catherine Ann, University of Western Sydney, College of Science, Technology and Environment, School of Environment and Agriculture
Source SetsAustraliasian Digital Theses Program
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
SourceTHESIS_CSTE_EAG_Holmes_C.xml

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