Shaping the future - the movement hailed as a renaissance for health promotion - is leading us to 'health promotion apartheid', according to Professor John Ashton, Director of Public Health Cumbria Primary Care Trust and Cumbria County Council writing in the latest issue of JRSH (The Journal of The Royal Society of Health).

'I find Shaping the future profoundly depressing,' says Professor Ashton. 'It seems to be an attempt to create a parallel universe for health promotion outside of what now exists in public health as an inclusive, holistic, and integrated approach to public health practice. It is difficult to see what a separate world for health promotion would have to offer.'

'This health promotion apartheid is irrelevant in this day and age,' he says.

Angela Scriven, Reader in health promotion at Brunel University, guest editor of the Shaping the future special issue of JRSH, says: 'This important edition of JRSH comes following a difficult period for health promotion in the UK. The discipline has been marginalized and needs to reassert itself as a significant component of public health, providing a positive and effective force for equity in health.'

'A multidisciplinary approach to public health practice is what JRSH is all about,' says JRSH Honorary Editor Dr Selwyn Hodge. 'But we believe that health promotion initiatives and professionals need a raised and recognized status within the integrated public health workforce. We champion the Shaping the future movement because the well-being of the general public will benefit if health promotion activities are given appropriate support, and because health promotion specialists deserve recognition. I'm very pleased that JRSH is at the forefront of both the movement and the debate!'

'Shaping the future' has become the rallying cry for health promoters in the first decade of the 21st century, and the September issue of JRSH provides the most authoritative collection of academic articles on the movement yet published, with contributions from Jim McEwen and Lillian Somervaille, Jenny Griffiths, Caroline Coen and Jane Wills, Sian Griffiths and Allison Thorpe, Fiona Sim, Jane South, Jenny Woodward and Diane Lowcock.

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3 September 2007