Which of the following is an example of health promotion?

Health promotion encompasses activities and strategies designed to prevent disease and enhance the overall health and well-being of a population before illness occurs. It operates at the primary prevention level, targeting entire communities to reduce the incidence of disease rather than treating individuals who are already sick.

Vaccination campaigns to prevent infectious diseases are a classic example of health promotion. Mass immunisation programmes protect individuals and create herd immunity within populations, stopping the spread of diseases such as measles, polio, and tuberculosis before they can take hold.

The other options represent different levels of healthcare, not health promotion:

• Prescription of antibiotics for infections is curative medicine (secondary prevention) - it treats an existing disease.
• Emergency surgery for accident victims is acute clinical care - it addresses immediate, life-threatening injury.
• Rehabilitation after a stroke is tertiary prevention - it helps a patient recover function after a disease event has already occurred.

The defining feature of health promotion is its proactive, preventive nature. It aims to keep healthy people healthy, rather than restoring health after it has been lost.