Implementing mental health promotion: A health education and promotion perspective

Mental health promotion may learn from the achievements in the field of health education and promotion. Health education and promotion has seen four major developments in the last decades: the need for planning, the need for evaluation, the behaviour-environment issue, and the use of theory. A recently presented protocol for developing theory-based and evidence-based interventions, Intervention Mapping, is described here in more detail. Prominent in planning models and intervention protocols is implementation. The same expertise and professionalism that we put in the development of health promotion interventions for our target groups should be put in implementation interventions for program users and decision makers.