“Education does not consist in teaching someone what to think, but in shaping the way in which they must learn to think!”

Health education is a matter of the utmost importance in the medicine of the healthy person, consisting in developing the level of health literacy of the various population groups,
as well as the educational means and methods needed to form health-promoting behaviour.

Seen in this way, health education is an important method of action in securing public cooperation in health protection. Health education forms the basis of population-wide action, holding a priority place in the consistently preventive orientation of healthcare, based on broad cooperation from the public.

The basic objective of health education is to form and develop, from childhood onwards, health-promoting behaviour aimed at protecting health by increasing the body's general resistance and its capacity to adapt to environmental, natural and social conditions. Health education is the “matrix”, the basis for implementing health programmes, guaranteeing their effectiveness through cooperation with the population, the beneficiary of health promotion actions.

Health education for the population must be a major objective of national health policy, aimed at raising the level of health literacy of the entire population; it must be widely accessible, predominantly preventive in orientation, and must ensure the active involvement of the population in actions to promote, maintain and restore individual and community health.

Health education actions must be directed not only towards forming attitudes and behaviours capable of reducing the effects of aggressive biological, physical and chemical agents characteristic of modern life, but must also be oriented, in parallel, towards countering certain manifestations reflecting negative components liable to damage the psychosocial environment, to harm the principles of civilised coexistence, respect between people, politeness in interpersonal relations, the appearance of streets and of clothing, standards in public venues, etc.

The health of the population ultimately depends on the extent to which all members of society incorporate it into their concerns, both individually and at community level.

Health education must be understood as a tool for ensuring a harmonious balance in life, and not as a set of prohibitions or restrictive, coercive advice.

In the modern era, health education contributes effectively to raising the level of health literacy, which ensures an improvement in the health of the population by cultivating an increasingly health-promoting lifestyle, with a view to attaining the ideal of bio-psycho-social health.