Why do health care institutions offer prevention services?

This is data from a national study conducted by Wilson et al, published in 1997. The study surveyed 600 hospitals across the country concerning preventive services they offered to patients and communities. This slide shows the reasons the hospitals identified for offering such programs.

You can see that healthcare institutions use health promotion as a marketing tool as much as they use it to help improve health in the community. In other words if people use their services for learning how to prevent disease then they may use their services when they become ill. However, there is still debate among the experts about the financial benefits of prevention and many feel it does not generate revenue.