The Center was established in 1982 under the name Center of Hygiene and Epidemiology, and renamed National Center for Health Promotion (NCHP) in 1997. Our mandate is to engage in a participatory process to develop, strengthen and support health promotion throughout Cambodia. NCHP is an institution under the Ministry of Health (MOH). In addition to supporting health promotion we play a key role in developing Behaviour Change Communication (BCC) support and activities for health workers at national, provincial and village level. This is done focusing especially on promotion of 12 key family health practices with technical support from the European Commission and UNICEF under the Behaviour Change Communication project.

NCHP is situated in the heart of Phnom Penh in close proximity to the Centers partners. The Centers staff is organised into teams that work with all aspects of health promotion from research over planning and production of campaigns to monitoring and evaluation of activity progress and behaviour changes. In addition to promotion of the 12 key family health practices we work with promotion of tobacco control, sound hygiene, primary health care and reproductive health practices.

NCHP has been designated the role as developing into the lead agency in BCC on health. We aim to develop into a Center of excellence in BCC that can support the health sector and our partners to coordinate and strengthen health promotion in Cambodia. In order to do so we apply a strategy of learning by doing and improving by learning. We do so focusing on promoting healthy lifestyles and appropriate health seeking behaviour of health service consumers, as well as strengthening the skills of health providers and village health support groups to practice relevant and tangible health promotion.