Health education is a planned learning process that helps people develop knowledge, skills, attitudes, confidence and decision-making capacity related to health. It is not simply the transfer of information. Effective education begins with what people already know, believe and experience and links information to practical action. A nurse who lists the benefits of exclusive breastfeeding without discovering what the mother already believes about breastfeeding, her support network and her working conditions has delivered information, not education. Planning — deciding what the learner needs, in what form, from whom and with what follow-up — is what separates education from advice.

Health promotion is broader than health education. It includes actions that enable individuals and communities to increase control over the factors affecting their health. These factors may include living conditions, social support, policies, environments, services and economic opportunities. A health education session on hypertension is one health promotion action; a workplace policy that removes salt from the cafeteria, funds blood-pressure screening and allows flexible clinic attendance is another. The health educator therefore works not only with learners but with managers, councils and organisations, because the environment in which people make decisions shapes how far education can succeed.

Health advocacy is a deliberate effort to influence decisions, policies, resource allocation, organisational practices or public priorities that affect health. The immediate audience for advocacy may be a policymaker, facility manager, local authority, professional body or community leader rather than the person experiencing the health problem. Advocacy asks a different question from education: not 'how do I help this person act on what they know?' but 'what decision, rule or resource must change so that this problem becomes easier to solve for many people at once?' Effective practitioners move fluidly between the two, using community evidence from education work to make the case for system change.

Work through the four sections of this module in order: core concepts, levels of prevention, principles of effective health education, and educator roles. Each section builds on the previous one, and the module test at the end checks your grasp of the whole. As you read, translate each concept into your own setting — the health service, school, NGO or workplace where you practice — because the value of foundations lies entirely in what they change about your next session, counselling conversation or advocacy meeting.