Department of Health, Taipei City Government

The government of Taipei city promotes the program of healthy city in Taipei and stipulates Overall Objectives and Secondary Objectives which serve as the guideline for formulating Implementation Strategies and Principles of Development expatiated as follows:

1. Overall Objectives

Primarily guided by five guidelines of actions in the Ottawa Charter, the overall objectives aim at thoroughly implementing five guidelines of actions, with the through thread of promoting the overall health of the local region, to comprehensively promote environmental health and cooperation among publics so as to build a healthy city.

Overall, objectives of the city are:

(1) to reduce unequal health; (2) to create supportive physical and social environment; (3) to advocate a health service system based on communities.

2. Secondary Objectives

Secondary objectives refer to the fact that each group achieves objectives of healthy city where it belongs to. The municipal government of Taipei clearly realized that the basic spirit of public health should be health promotion and disease prevention rather than treatment. Therefore, instead of personal intervention, we resort to the intervention of municipal government power and social power to improve community health, reduce inequality regarding social resources and health, respect ecology and provide the next generation with a clean, green, quiet, healthy, safe, convenient, and comfortable environment that support public life. Consequently, take the Department of Health as an example, our five objectives are: (1) to prolong the life expectancy of Taipei citizens; (2) to create a healthy environment and protect people’s health from being harmed; (3) to develop personal health and promote personal knowledge-ability for the purpose of health promotion; (4) to plan the lifetime health of citizens and offer information related to health; (5) to advocate the concept of healthy cities in every aspect of city life and every department of the government to turn it into a trend and internalize the concept.

Implementation Strategies and Principles of Development

1. Implementation Strategies

According to ideas of the Taipei healthy city plan, it is expected that principles of health could be practically implemented in grassroots. The plan aims at promoting the physical, mental, and social health of people in virtue of joint cooperation between the local government and volunteers.

Strategies of Taipei healthy city are lead by five guidelines of actions of the 1986 Ottawa Charter:

• Formulate healthy public policies: Decision-makers of policies from each department and each level of Taipei government shall take health into consideration. All departments shall realize that their decisions will determine the health of people and understand their responsibilities upon health.
• Create health-support environment: Health cannot be achieved simply by each individual objective within the complex society. Health composes of every part of social ecological environment, that is, the basis jointly formed by human and environment.
• Enhance the community agency: Promote the community empowerment, self-awareness, autonomy and self-determination and facilitate communities to personally get involved in every level related to health promotion by means of participatory democracy.
• Develop personal health skills: Offer education of health and enhance living abilities via information to increase people’s knowledge and control of their own health.
• Adjust orientations of health service: Develop a health service system based on communities for the reason that the role of a health service department must move toward the orientation of health promotion and should beyond primary responsibilities of clinical and treatment service.

2. Principles of Development

As a city with pluralistic development, Taipei is able to absorb and learn different and new concepts during the process of implementing the healthy city plan. It is capable of continuously adjusting progressive paces of the plan among changes and act according to different time, places, and situations without alternating the general orientation.

The following are principles of development for Taipei when carrying out the healthy city plan:

• Develop a comprehensive, interdepartmental and integrated Taipei healthy city plan.
• Assist and promote joint cooperation among the community health center.
• Promote joint cooperation and researches among different fields (health, culture, ecology, economy, basic livelihood projects, leisure and recreation, etc.).
• Utilize existing or future resources as guides for the plan development.
• Put forward feedback toward advice or suggestions, particularly without ignoring voices from communities.
• Apply available steps with the expectation of achieving objectives of the plan.