The Health Education Code of Ethics has been a work in progress since approximately 1976, begun by the Society of Public Health Education (SOPHE). Various Public Health and Health Education organizations such as the American Association of Health Education (AAHE), the Coalition of National Health Education Organizations (CNHEO), SOPHE, and others collaborated year after year to devise a unified standard of ethics that health educators would be held accountable to professionally. In 1995, the National Commission for Health Education Credentialing, Inc. (NCHEC) proposed a profession-wide standard at the conference: Health Education Profession in the Twenty-First Century: Setting the Stage. Post-conference, an ethics task force was developed with the purpose of solidifying and unifying proposed ethical standards. The document was eventually unanimously approved and ratified by all involved organizations in November 1999 and has since then been used as the standard for practicing health educators.
"The Code of Ethics that has evolved from this long and arduous process is not seen as a completed project. Rather, it is envisioned as a living document that will continue to evolve as the practice of Health Education changes to meet the challenges of the new millennium."