Sri Lanka

Health promotion in Sri Lanka has been very successful during recent decades as shown by the health indicators. Despite the numerous successes over the years, the integrity of the health system has been subjected to many challenges. Sri Lanka is already facing emerging challenges due to demographic, epidemiological, technological and socio-economic transitions. The disease burden has started to shift rapidly towards lifestyle and environmental related non-communicable diseases. These are chronic and high cost and will cause more and perhaps unaffordable burden to the country’s health care expenditure, under the free of charge health services policy. The previous success of health development increased the life expectancy of Sri Lankan people to 72 for male and 76 for women but the estimated “healthy life expectancy” at birth of all Sri Lanka population is only 61.6

Health is affected by biological, psychological, chemical, physical, social, cultural and economic factors in people’s normal living environments and people’s lifestyles. With the current rapid changing demographic, social and economic context and the epidemiological pattern of diseases, the previous health promotion interventions which found to be effective in the past may not be effective enough now and the future to address all the important determinants that affect health. Promoting people’s health must be the joint responsibility of all the social actors. These challenges require significant changes in the national health system toward new effective health promotion which has been accepted worldwide as the most cost effective measure to reduce the disease burden of the people and the burden of the nation on the increasing cost for treatment of diseases.

The development of this National Health Promotion Policy is based on: (a) the evidences from Sri Lanka health promotion situation analysis, (b) the international accepted concept, the WHO guiding principle for health promotion and the World Health Assembly resolutions and WHO South East Asia Regional Committee Resolution, and (c) the State Policy and Strategy for Health and the Health Master Plan 2007–2016.

The key strategies for health promotion are: advocacy and mediate between different interests in society for the pursuit of health; empower and enable individual and communities to take control over their own health and all determinants of health; improve the health promotion management, health promotion interventions, programs, plans and implementation; and partnership, networking, alliance building and integration of health promotion activities across sectors.

In Sri Lanka, other non health government sectors and NGOs are currently active implementing their community development projects with the community empowerment concept that resemble the healthy setting approach for health promotion. These projects are the high potential entry points and good opportunity for the formal commencement of the new effective setting approach health promotion and the holistic life course health promotion. It is also an opportunity for partnerships and alliance building for concerted action to promote health of the nation. This policy is formulated to promote health and well-being of the people by enabling all people to be responsible for their own health and address the broad determinants of health through the concerted actions of health and all other sectors to make Sri Lanka a Health Promoting Nation where all the citizens actively participate in health promotion activities continuously for a healthy life expectancy.

The policy objectives are as follow :

1. To strengthen leaderships for health promotion at all levels and all sectors through advocacy.
2. To mobilize the society and create nationwide health promotion actions.
3. To develop and implement effective comprehensive holistic and multisectoral approach health promotion interventions.
4. To establish an effective system and mechanism for health promotion management and coordination at all levels.
5. To build capacity for health promotion at all levels and across sectors.
6. To improve financing and resources allocation and utilization for health promotion.
7. To establish an evidence-base for health promotion effectiveness.

Various strategies have been developed for the attainment of each objective focus on the multi-sectoral comprehensive approach and participation of all stakeholders and the people themselves. This National Health Promotion Policy will be monitored and evaluated at all levels. Participatory monitoring and evaluation will be encouraged at implementation level.The National Health Promotion Consortium and the National Health Council will be responsible for the regular monitoring and evaluation of the implementation of this National Health Promotion Policy. Implementation of this policy will also be monitored regularly as part of the overall process of monitoring the activities of the Government and Ministries and covering various sectors and levels of government.