Letter – Is a unified definition of health promotion coterminous with the ‘new public health’?

Introduction: Howat et al. advocate for a clear definition of health promotion, providing one such definition which they characterised as “consistent with identified competencies for the Australian health promotion workforce”, and welcomed the contributions of others. My contributions are as follows: First, health promotion is generally regarded as the ‘new public health’, a perspective not explicitly subscribed to in Howat's article. Are the authors concurrently attempting to define the ‘new public health’? Incidentally, a unified definition of contemporary public health remains elusive. Consensus on whether contemporary health promotion and the ‘new public health’ are coterminous should precede a definitional consensus, in part to prevent duplication.