A Public Health Perspective on Wellbeing

ABSTRACT

This chapter places the promotion of wellbeing in the context of public health practice and explores enduring challenges, practical solu­tions, and synergies with the field of positive psychology and contextual behavioural science. Public health applies multilevel frameworks of health and wellbeing to inform and develop policies and programmes to improve population health and wellbeing outcomes, distinct from individual out­comes. How the concept of wellbeing is translated into policy and practice matters, particularly in the face of recent and emerging political, societal, and public health challenges in the UK such as "Brexit”, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the climate emergency—where the need to protect and promote the population's health and wellbeing and address inequalities have become ever more pressing. Specifically, the chapter provides exam­ples of how public health tools such as Health Impact Assessment (HIA) and Mental Wellbeing Impact Assessment (MWIA) can facilitate upstream multi-sectoral collaboration to integrate wellbeing into policy and programmes. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2022