A Compelling Health Promoting Primary Care Clinic Using a Settings-Based Approach: A Demonstration Project

The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, issued by the World Health Organization in 1986, called for several strategies to promote the public's health. One of the strategies was to create health-promoting health services. Over 35 years have passed since the Ottawa Charter was released, since then, efforts to improve health care have been implemented such as the Patient-Centered Medical Home, the Triple Aim, and the Affordable Care Act, yet little has been done to reorient the cultural and physical environment of health care services to one focused on health promotion. In this perspective, the author offers a compelling description of how one primary care clinic, serving an ethnically and economically diverse population, utilized a settings-based approach to design and implement several health-promoting policies, systems, and environmental strategies. This reorientation of a primary care clinic to one that is health-promoting leveraged the clinical specialty of lifestyle medicine as a cornerstone of the settings-based approach.