Creating health and health promoting hospitals: a worthy challenge for the twenty-first century.

States that it seems self-evident that a hospital should be a healing environment, a healthy place to work, should not harm the health of the environment and should contribute to and be a source of health in the community, but argues that hospitals have not paid a great deal of attention to many of these issues until recently. Suggests that in recent years, a new and broader understanding of health promotion has led to a re-examination of the ways in which hospitals can be both healthy and health-promoting. Begins by exploring the broader concepts of health promotion that lay the foundation for the creation of healthy and health-promoting hospitals and provides some examples of how these approaches are being applied.