Health and Wellbeing - Essay Example

Health and Wellbeing Recent years, health and social care professionals underline the increasing role of promotion of healthy and active lifestyle inmedical services and social care. Health promotion has established itself as a practice distinct from systems of health care based upon the bio-medical paradigm. However, health promotion itself has not been immune from these critiques. Health and social care professionals should understand impact and influence of stress and stress-related issues on their patients because only deep knowledge and understanding could help to develop appropriate programs and maintain healthy lifestyle. The main problem is that the impact of stress on performance and lifestyle is perhaps greater now than at any time in history. Modern society lives in an increasingly complex, high-technology world in which the potential for catastrophic error has greatly increased. Knowledge of stresses-related issues plays a crucial role in medial practice, and influences healthcare programs and methods, quality of the decisions made by health and social care professionals. Stress is defined as "relationship between the person and the environment that is appraised by the person as taxing ... and endangering his or her well-being" (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984, p. 19 cited Fletcher et al 2006, p. 92). For healthcare professionals, it is difficult enough to make decisions in operational settings where the stakes are high and data are ambiguous. Whether the stressors are time constraints, noise, workload, or threat, they can play havoc with the clear thinking needed in these settings. In life of patients, they can degrade the quality of judgments, prevent the use of rational decision strategies, and severely compromise performance; at least, that is a popular appraisal of stressors. Decision makers are adaptive in their reactions to stressors. The decision strategies used in the presence of stressors may be simpler, but they are rational and make powerful use of experience. Health and social care professionals should understand internal and external factors that influence the individual and his emotional and psychological reaction to these factors. Stress reactions are controlled by self-regulative processing constructs, including the stable knowledge structures that support self-beliefs and motivations, processing routines for self-monitoring and self-evaluation, 'metacognitive beliefs' about the utility of emotion-focused coping, and coping skills (Fletcher et al 2006). Self-regulation is organized at three levels: a lower, automatic level that generates intrusive thoughts, an executive level that regulates coping, and schema-like self-knowledge in long-term memory. Knowledge gives freedom and guarantees complete control over the programs and methods, ways of treatment and improvements in healthcare plans. A focus on a single health behavior does not adequately represent the complexity of behavioral effects on health (Cribb and Duncan 2002). Strategies such as decision analysis using subjective expected utility judgments and multiattribute utility analyses are best suited for cases in which there is less time pressure, more carefully collected data, multiple stakeholders, or generally lower levels of experience. The strategies are termed compensatory strategies, because they are designed to compensate for a small weakness on one or two attributes or evaluation dimensions if an option shows major strengths on other evaluation dimensions (Gandee et al 1998). For health and social care professionals, there are a variety of sources of information that can be used to derive a model of human performance under stress: accident analysis, incident analysis, operator protocols and lifestyle (Fletcher et al 2006). Transactional stress processes may generate both direct and indirect effects on performance, mediated by coping and self-regulative processes. Direct effects follow from task-related coping efforts, such as voluntary decisions to adopt a risky speed-accuracy trade-off, to prioritize one of two tasks in a dual-task situation, or to monitor a particular source of stimuli. Of course, task-focused coping does not necessarily function as intended. Indirect effects follow from emotion-focused coping, which may initiate self-referent processing that interferes with concurrent task processing. Such cognitive interference is best known from test anxiety research, in which performance deficits are typically characterized as a reallocation of 'attentional resources' or working memory from the task at hand to processing internal worries (Gandee et al 1998). Knowledge and understanding of stress-related issues allow health/social care professionals to concentrate on development and maintenance of health behavior strongly influenced by the structural, social and group specific context of the actor (Gandee et al 1998). A perspective focused on the individual (patient) does not provide for a comprehensive understanding of such processes. It is important to note that emotional symptoms of stress are difficult to identify because they involve such symptoms as anxiety and hypersensitivity. Physical symptoms are clear and involve: headaches, digestion problems, muscle tension and pain, sleep disturbances, fatigue and skin problems, loss of sexual drive. The main types of stress are acute stress, episodic acute stress, chronic stress and traumatic stress. Knowledge and understudying of stress allow social workers and healthcare professionals to construct a causal account that takes advantage of experience about what people might do in different situations, with different goals. Social workers and healthcare professionals try to imagine a sequence of events in which the unfriendly environments actually would outfit. For social workers and healthcare professionals, it is crucial to examine the chronic impact of stress on lifestyle and health issues. For instance, a chronic or cognitive stress interpretation show that one must also recognize that almost any fatigue interpretation requires a peak later in the workweek or at the end of the workweek. Following Fletcher et al (2006) contemporary research on the impact of work schedules demonstrates that stress and fatigue are distinct, complex, and interactive constructs. These two constructs are useful when the goal is to communicate the presence of a threatening occupational health and safety risk that might be avoided. The search for meaningful associations of health lifestyle elements can start at a lower level of complexity by studying associations between selected behaviors, orientations and resources. Health orientations are considered here as a particular form of rational thought and as major determinants of particular health lifestyles. Knowledge and understanding is important because orientations towards health and health behavior are based on perception of what is and what can realistically be expected with regard to their own health and health behavior in general. Knowledge is important because "mainstream medicine has become increasingly fragmented as privately managed care providers undermine physician autonomy and increasingly dominate decisions about service utilization" (Lesnik, 2004, p. 1). The terrain for basic and applied knowledge and understanding of the issues relating to healthy lifestyle is broad, ranging from population-level prevention activity, through individual-level interventions to action on the structural and cultural determinants of health. While recognizing the multi-faceted nature of health, its production and maintenance, the tendency has been to assume that health promotion practice should encompass a similarly broad sweep. Following Fletcher et al (2006): Work-related stress is a major problem with serious implications for health and wellbeing but managing it is far from straightforward. This may account for the documented ineffectiveness of stress management interventions. In managing the 'stressors' at work, it is important to identify, assess and control stressors, but also to avoid removing the rewarding aspects of the job (p. 92). Understanding the effects of stress on human health and even lifestyle has always been of great interest to the human factors profession. However, it is often difficult to tell whether stress is itself a causal factor in the poor health or whether the conditions that produced the stress are also those that degraded the information available in such a way that the poorer decision became more likely. Through a recognition that many health problems were related to individual lifestyles, the issue of cost containment became conflated with a concern to manage the consequences of risk. For instance, long-term effects of stress are cardiovascular disorders and damage of the immune system, depression, eating disorders, substance abuse and infertility. In this case, a key element of the new health care culture is that decisions about how to improve health and reduce stress should be informed by evidence of need and especially evidence of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. The main task of the health and social care professionals is to understand that not all forms of prevention are successful: there is evidence that well-designed and targeted programs, particularly those concerned with smoking and diet (Cribb and Duncan 2002). Stress can cause dissatisfaction and disappointment resulted from incredible information flow and irritability. One of the possible strategies to overcome stress situations is to change patients' thinking, behavior and lifestyle. This approach helps patients start to enjoy their life and work. It is a healthy way of thinking and life perception. This approach implies an optimistic attitude towards stressful situations. If a person has a strong personal credo, he is not dependent upon external factors. If a person has strong personal beliefs it helps him to cope with any stressful situation at work (Cribb and Duncan 2002). The matter is that his attitude towards this situation differs. He or she considers complexity as a part of work but not as a stressful situation. Alternative remedies for stress include aaromatherapy, mediation, acupuncture and stress balls. These methods can be seen as a part of health programs and influence new ways of thinking. Valid endpoints for community health development programs might include, for example, non-health or indirect health outcomes, such as sense of community, community empowerment, and community competencies that impact upon the social, cultural, economic, environmental and political determinants of health. It is imperative that the methods healthcare professionals use fully capture the desired effects of a program (Cribb and Duncan 2002). The experience of trying to use reviews published to date is that they provide an insufficient basis upon which to make an appraisal of options to inform the development of practice or policy. Healthcare professionals use such medications as Prozac and lithium for depression, tranquilizers and sleeping tablets. Thus, effective treatment requires knowledge and understanding of all factors which led to stress. Health knowledge and efforts have aimed to bring about positive changes in individuals' health behavior by communicating information about risks of continuing unhealthy lifestyles and the benefits of adopting a healthier lifestyle. Multicultural environment creates new demands and methods, new strategies and tactics used by health/social care professionals. The problem is that working in technologically complicated environment, the individual should be very attentive to any changes and threats. The consequences include job dissatisfaction and accidents. In this case, the role of health/social care professional is to develop an appropriate program for the patient creating meaningful change in their lives (Lesnik, 2004). Clearly a greater understanding of stress and its causes is needed before health professionals can hope to influence behavior of their patients. Campaign planners must know their target audience: the salience of the issue to them, their involvement in it, and where they are cognitively, affectively and behaviorally. The consensus of opinion in health literature is that there is a general need for more formative research informing campaign design. Knowledge and understanding are the primary 'tools' for tailoring health programs and maintaining healthy lifestyles. Bibliography 1. Cribb, A., Duncan, P. 2002, Health Promotion and Professional Ethics. Blackwell Science Ltd. 2. Fletcher, R., Gardner, D., Mcgowan, J. 2006, Positive and Negative Affective Outcomes of Occupational Stress. New Zealand Journal of Psychology, 35, p. 92. 3. Gandee, R.N., Knierim, H., Mclittle-Marino, D. 1998, Stress and Older Adults: A Mind-Body Relationship. JOPERD--The Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, vol. 69, iss. 9, p. 19. 4. Lesnik, J. 2004. Community Health Centers: Health Care as It Could Be. Journal of Law and Health, vol. 19, iss. 1, pp. 1-2. Read More