Human behavior plays a key role in the maintenance of human health, and wellbeing. This review highlighted the influences of health promotion on changing individuals and community behaviors. Furthermore, it explored the importance of tackling both individuals and community behaviors in health promotion interventions, especially in emergencies such as coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Health promotion, Individuals, Community, Behaviour

Health promotion is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve their health” [1]. Health promotion moves beyond a focus on individual behavior towards a wide range of social and environmental interventions [1]. Researchers reported two main effects of interventions, first one, through a direct effect on people initially targeted by the intervention (individuals), and second one, an indirect effect mediated by social influence and by the observation of other people’s behavior (the community) [2]. As unhealthy behavior is responsible for poor human health, therefore, the common goal of public health is to encourage behavior change, through proposing suitable health promotions programs to promote healthy behaviors [3]. Health promotion enhance people to increase control over their diseases, be productive, and safe their resources [4-6]. A plethora of studies documented the strong relationship between health promotion and positive health outcomes [4-9]. Human behavior plays a key role in the maintenance of human health, and wellbeing [10]. To have a positive health outcomes, health promotion interventions such as healthy lifestyles, physical activity and nutrition should take into account both individuals and community behaviors as both of them are closely interrelated. This interrelation was documented by many researchers [10,11]. Therefore, logic follows that, studying both of them together and not merely separately could propose interventions aiming to have effective health promotion interventions.

To enhance the efficacy of health promotion interventions aiming to have better health outcomes at both individuals and the community levels, many actions are needed such as redesigning the role of professionals and people [12]. In order to adopt a healthy behavior, three phases of changes are needed awareness, motivation, and action; this was explained well by Cheung, et al, by taking nonsmoking via smoking cessation as an example [13].

Although health promotional interventions are cost effective in improving health and wellbeing of nations [4-9], they are not without challenges [14,15]. Thus, researchers proposed many suggestions to overcome such challenges including:

- Application of a comprehensive strategy targeting behavior change and health promotion that can play a role in overcoming through well planning, coordination, and community involvement [14]
- Working together (community and individual) to enable behavior change towards a common shared goal such as climate changes [15]
- Building capacity of health promotion to focus on vulnerable and marginal members of the community [16].
- Maintaining the sustainability of health promotion interventions by involving of multi-stakeholder such as agencies, organizations, and employees [17]. Despite of relative success in achieving behavior change in the short term, it can be difficult to sustain such success in long term [3]. Therefore, to ensure sustainability of health promotion programs at early stages of planning, developing and implementing certain factors need to be considered including organizational capacity, partnerships, strategic planning, funding, program evaluation and capacity building [18].

Behavioral changes were more prominent during infectious diseases, especially in emergencies such as coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) [19-21]. For example, in Singapore, Long and Liu reported 97% of the participants suffered at least one behavioral change on account of the pandemic [19].

It is worth mentioning that, such integration between individuals and community health promotion was so fruitful in promoting mental health during COVID-19 pandemic [19,20,22].

In the past and present, it is clear health promotion has been contributing to maintain health and wellbeing of nations. To have positive health outcomes and with low cost, health promotion needs to be included in future policies. Researchers predicted health promotion to play a key role in helping people achieve the highest levels of wellness [23]. In future, maximizing usefulness of digital health promotion and prevention such as mobile appbased health promotion programs for the general population including schools, sport clubs, and healthcare facilities is recommended, especially in developing [24,25].

In conclusion, health promotion plays a positive role (the maintenance of human health, and wellbeing) in changing individuals and community behaviors in the past, present and future.

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