Health Promotion and Disease Prevention in Latin America

The chapter aims to conceptualize the objectives and characteristics of health promotion and disease prevention. In this context, it proposes to base promotion and prevention on the WHO’s Social Determinants of Health approach as a framework for health psychology. This approach drives the development of actions that allow health psychology to: a) recognize the social, economic, political, and cultural realities of Latin American countries; b) abandon a medicalized conception of health centered on individual risk and disease, in favor of adopting a more complex and positive perspective; c) transcend the individual level in the approaches; and d) insert itself in the construction of public policies and in the implementation of existing ones. In addition, the chapter reviews some public health policies in four Latin American countries, to analyze whether they are framed from a social determinants approach and what actions for health promotion and disease prevention they include. Considering this, the authors problematize the role of Latin American health psychology and propose future directions.