Background: Health promotion is considered as a process that strengthens health conditions, shapes attitudes, supports behavioural changes to attain the utmost physical and mental health, and organizes the social and physical environment of a person. Aim & Objective: To identify the level of health-promoting behaviour and the associated socio-demographic factors among school-going adolescents in Puducherry. Settings and Design: A cross-sectional analytical study was conducted among 705 school-going adolescents of standard IX-XII from five government and private schools in rural and urban areas. Methods and Material: Multistage sampling was used to select the subjects and the Adolescent Health Promotion Score (AHP 40) was used to assess the health-promoting behaviour of an adolescent. The data was entered in MS Excel and analysed using SPSS v16. Statistical analysis used: Mean ± SD were used to summarize the Total Adolescent Health Promotion Score. Multiple linear regression model was used to assess the association between socio-demographic variables and Adolescent health promotion behaviour. Results: Among the 705 participants, the mean age of the students was 14.9 (±1.4). The mean AHP score of the students was 147.78(±20.59). It was observed that the majority of the students (53%) had a high health promoting behaviour. The number of siblings and father’s profession significantly predicted higher scores of adolescent health promoting behaviour. Conclusions: More than half of the student population had high level of health promoting behaviour. The family and school related variables had significant association with the health promoting behaviour of adolescents

Introduction: Sugar Sweetened Beverages (SSBs) consumption has increased to higher levels across all corners of the world.  High sugar diets in the form of SSBs lead to increased calorie intake with almost no nutritive value when compared to solid food and contributes to the increased energy intake resulting in an unhealthy weight gain, often associated with health issues such as obesity, diabetes, cardio-vascular diseases, early tooth decay and formation of cavities. It is also observed that consumption of SSBs is linked to unhealthy habits like smoking, decreased physical activity, increased intake of fast food and increased screen time. Method: The required information on SSB tax implementation at the global level was retrieved from the literature reviews. Result: Taking such detrimental effects of SSBs into consideration, many countries are putting efforts to tackle the problem of higher consumption of SSBs by adopting measures such as taxations on SSBs. However, it is also extremely important to understand how these taxes help in generating higher revenues to the government which, in turn, can be used for various community needs in the respective countries. Conclusion: The same revenue can also be utilised for implementation of comprehensive healthcare programmes especially in Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC), by providing preventive, promotive, curative, rehabilitative and palliative services as a way to progress towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC).

The declaration of World Health Assembly in the year 2005 paved the way for all the member states to plan for the transition towards universal coverage to their respective citizens. This was underpinned by the notion that access to quality basic and essential health services has to be made available for everyone to combat poverty and to achieve the developmental goals worldwide. This global movement towards universal coverage is considered as one of the greatest transitions in health, the other being the demographic transition and epidemiological transition. Since the adoption of Universal Health Coverage (UHC), the road taken by each country to achieve UHC is diverse and unique to its culture, needs of people and health systems in the respective country. However, all these approaches have a commonality of promoting and providing health insurance as an important mechanism to achieve UHC. Providing health insurance to ensure health coverage for all the citizens has been well tested and proved to be a viable option. But, addressing other needs and requirements of health systems such as expansion of health infrastructure, reinforcement of the health care workforce and reorganization of the existing health systems in line with newer policies is also extremely important.