I would like to start by saying how pleased I am that Health Promotion in Midwifery has reached a second edition, the first having been more popular than my
editors at Arnold or I had ever dreamed possible. The development of the principles and practices laid out in this second edition will enable midwives and other health
professionals to keep health promotion at the forefront of their midwifery practice. The popularity of this, and other publications, demonstrates that midwifery and
health promotion are very comfortable partners in the minds and hearts of midwives.While many of the principles of health promotion have followed a continuing pattern of growth and development in recent years, the popularity of the term ‘public health’ has re-entered British politics and health care, with an increasingly stronger emphasis being placed on preventative health care, social support of disadvantaged families and health protection that explores environmental threats to health. All of these require the input of midwives and midwifery to move our understanding of health issues forward, and no other health profession is so ideally placed to enable women and young families to benefit from increasing good-quality information that is fairly distributed and sensitively shared. This book will enable midwives to learn about many different aspects of health promotion, to consider how best to put that information into practice, and how we prepare future generations of mothers and midwives to gain improvements in the health of people and populations.