Occupational Therapy Students' Views of Health Promotion (Short Report) (Report‪)‬

Introduction Since the Ottawa Charter (World Health Organisation [WHO] 1986) urged health care professionals to become advocates, enablers and mediators for health, there has been growing international interest in their contribution to health promotion (Scriven 2005). An early advocate was Wilcock (1998), who argued that occupational therapy, with its focus on humans as occupational beings and its belief in the positive effects of occupation on health, had a role at both individual and societal level in health promotion and community development. In Canada, Finlayson and Edwards (1995) suggested that health promotion was the integration and partnership between individuals and communities and that occupational therapy had much to offer. Later, the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists (1998) proposed that therapists could be effective at primary, secondary and tertiary health promotion. Extending this, Goddard (2005), an Australian therapist writing in the American Journal of Occupational Therapy, suggested that occupational therapists could be agents of change; for example, in commercial organisations, in aid programmes in developing countries and in international organisations.