Individuals have can fill various roles and have different levels of responsibility for health promotion. At the most basic level individuals have the responsibility to promote their own health. This means becoming educated about health, particularly the risk and protective behaviours. Individuals should then make choices that promote their own health.
Furthermore, an individual is responsible to promote health to those around them. This includes promoting health at your school, to your peers, and family. For example, a parent should help their child to make healthy choices and provide a healthy environment for the child to be raised in (e.g. smoke free, breast fed, etc). Another example, would be a teenager encouraging their peers to participate in greater amounts of physical activity and helping them avoid smoking and alcohol use.
In addition to these basic roles and responsibilities, individuals can also fill particular roles within health care that place a greater responsibility upon them for health promotion. For example, a General Practitioner is responsible to promote health within their practice. This means doing their job well in terms of treating patients, but also taking an active role in the promotion of disease prevention.
Other individuals would include your PDHPE teacher. They should take an active role in health promotion within their community, including the school. They should be an example for students to follow and encourage students to increase protective factors, maybe even offering before or after school physical activity or personal training to further increase activity levels.
It is clear that the individual is responsible for their own actions and in the promotion of health to those around them in an active manner. The role of the individual will vary depending on their position in society. A parent should play a different role from a child, but both can be active in health promotion. The same for a health care practitioner (physiotherapist, naturopath, community health worker, nurse, midwife etc). Their role in health promotion should be larger, as they are sources of authoritative knowledge and have responsibility for their clients and to promote health to the wider community, not just those immediately around them.
This would apply similarly to elite athletes, who are now held up as role models and used in health promotion. Extra responsibility also falls on celebrity health specialists such as Michelle Bridges, or celebrity chefs such as George Calombaris. Such people are in a privileged position to promote health as individuals.
Technology has also greatly increased the methods used to promote health. An individual can promote health by writing a blog with health information. By sharing health information using social media and doing their own research into health concerning particular issues of relevance to them. Such actions help to promote health and show individuals taking on roles and being responsible for health promotion, not just for their own health.
It becomes clear then, that the individual can promote health widely and influence the health of many other people. It is the individuals role and responsibility to be active in health promotion int heir context.