Healthy city assessment
Definitions
- It is a health promotion strategy that aims for citizens, as social actors, to identify their needs and prioritize activities aimed at improving their well-being and quality of life.
- According to the Ottawa letter and the European experience, they are called healthy cities; when we talk about the Latin American experience, we talk about healthy municipalities. They are municipalities or cities that are continually creating and improving physical and social environments, and expanding community resources that enable people to support each other in performing all the functions of life and to develop their full potential.
Background and history
The healthy municipalities have their origin in the Canadian Lalonde report of 1974, but it was in 1984 (then called healthy cities) in Toronto - Canada where the adaptation for the Western Hemisphere of successful health activities developed in Europe began; continued in 1992 at the International Conference on Health Promotion and Equity in Santa Fe de Bogotá - Colombia, by the Pan American Health Organization (as healthy municipalities), where now It is the municipalities that are truly spaces destined to be healthy.
The city or municipality can be considered as an organic ecosystem that must be in social, economic, ecological and political balance.
Social participation in healthy municipalities
Social action occurs through the interaction of the different municipal actors that have to do with health: inhabitants, production unions), representatives of the state, social institutions, health care institutions and other actors that are involved in one way or another in the improvement of collective well-being.
The experience in Peru
The execution of this strategy in Peru can be considered innovative in the aspect of being able to consolidate information from the communities in the Local Government, taking into account that this information is obtained from the dynamics of empowerment and capacity development as a result of social participation in the communities and municipalities. This information has been consolidated using an information system called SISMUNI.