Prevention and health promotion

This notice responds to a request from the ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux (department of health) of Québec. It is the result of the concerted efforts of two teams within the Institut national de santé publique du Québec (national institute of public health): the “Biohazard, environmental and occupational risks” team wrote the “legionellosis” section, and the “Safety and injury prevention” team wrote the “scalding” section.

Based on an analysis of the scientific literature and the data available in Québec, the Institute believes that preventing tap water scalds is as important as preventing legionellosis. These problems have similar consequences from a public health perspective and in both cases there are well-known, effective or promising prevention measures.

This document presents the conceptual and operational aspects of safety¹ and safety promotion. More specifically, it proposes a framework to favour planning and implementation of safety enhancement interventions in a community. It concerns unintentional injury, suicide, violence and crime. These problems are tackled within a prevention and health promotion perspective. It also favours a better integration of the most frequently used intervention models designed to improve the safety of the population.

This framework was developed with the contribution of a number of intervening agents (that will herewith be named "actors" in this text) and experts involved in safety enhancement activities from many parts of the world. The numerous discussions held with them lead to a number of consensus, which represent an essential part of the framework summarised bellow:

1. Safety is a fundamental human right.
2. Safety is a state in which hazards and conditio…