Malaysia & South Korea praises ThaiHealth as model organisation for health promotion
ThaiHealth has been celebrated by Malaysia and South Korea as a model organisation for health promotion of Asia, thanks to its conformity in framework with the Ottawa Charter, while urging the Thai government to keep on recognising the importance of health issues in various overlapping dimensions.
Tan Sri Dr Nasir bin Mohd Ashraf, President of the Malaysian Health Promotion Foundation (MySihat), spoke after a study trip to Thailand’s Health Promotion Foundation during October 26-27, 2015, that he had been informed about the public scrutiny on ThaiHealth’s operation and about how the organisation was urged to narrow the scope of work down to only tobacco and alcohol controls. As a response, he viewed that the current ThaiHealth’s work should be praised that it follows the five requirements as stated on the Ottawa Charter to the letter by promoting health in both personal and societal levels. Furthermore, Thailand’s ThaiHealth has a working culture that enables it to work closely with the government sector, the public sector, and the communities, which is a strong point that MySihat intends to learn. The Thai-Malaysian counterparts have also shared their proud past works for closer cooperation on the ASEAN and international levels as ThaiHealth is the model organisation that is celebrated throughout the world.
“ThaiHealth’s various projects are the good testimony to the efficiency of its organisation. Malaysia’s MySihat at its beginning has been studying ThaiHealth since 2009 to the point that this Malaysian health promotion foundation eventually grew into the full-fledged MySihat, leading to the nation’s smoke-free campaign starting at Malacca Historical City in 2010. The campaign has later been expanded into several cities in all states of Malaysia, thanks to the example done by ThaiHealth to push the law out to make 100% smoke-free cities in Thailand,” said the President of MySihat.
Meanwhile, Dr Suck Il Jang, CEO of South Korea’s K-Health organisation, said that the Korean health promotion foundation strongly hopes that it can learn to replicate the work of ThaiHealth in terms of pushing new laws in order to efficiently facilitate the health promotion work in South Korea. Thailand’s health promotion foundation is considered the model organisation in the Asia-Pacific region that touches every dimension of health promotion work – physically, mentally, and socially. Most importantly, thanks to ThaiHealth, K-Health has been successfully established as South Korea’s health promotion organisation.”
“I am personally surprised to hear the new about ThaiHealth being under public scrutiny because ThaiHealth is the most widely-accepted organisation in terms of conformity with the world-standard health promotion. My view is that ThaiHealth and K-Health are able to expand our coverage further in the future, as we all are facing with societal problems in several dimensions – conflicts, poverty, and inequity. If our organisations, as the leaders in health promotion, can work freely under full support of the country’s leader, I strongly believe that we will eventually pull through these conflicts as the country leader plays the most important role so as to bring about success from the health promotion efforts.” said Dr Jang.
Meanwhile, Dr Supreeda Adulyanon, Acting ThaiHealth Manager, added that, from 2011 to 2015, approximately 1,000 representatives of international organisations and visitors from 40 countries paid visits to ThaiHealth office in Thailand. Among those, more than 80% were policy-makers, executives, and academic specialists. ThaiHealth has offered important opportunities to exchange knowledge among their organisations, seeking to develop closer cooperation to further top up efforts of health promotion in our countries, and leading to good health among Thai and neighbouring people in Asia-Pacific according to the framework set by the Ministry of Public Health and the government.
