Health-Promoting Hospitals (HPH) as a concept, a project, a network, and a movement has its roots in the Ottawa Charter (WHO, Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, 1986). With its call for “reorienting health services,” the Ottawa Charter implicitly diagnosed that health services had a too-narrow mandate and mission on treatment of diseases, and therefore were in need of reform. Health promotion philosophy offered a widening of the understanding of health care toward disease prevention, health protection, and health promotion that goes beyond the hospital’s focus on cure and care. And that not just for patients’ health gain, but also for staff’s health and the health of the residents in the community a hospital serves. Yet, a concrete and comprehensive concept for hospitals as a health-promoting setting and for strategies to implement this concept into already existing hospital structures, cultures, and processes had to be developed and piloted, before a Network of Health-Promoting Hospitals could be established.
Along three parts, this chapter first reconstructs and describes the historical development of HPH, second reflects on how successful HPH has been so far in terms of its reproduction and production, and third concludes with some thoughts on the future of HPH and next steps.