Health and Health Promotion - Assignment Example

Health and Health Promotion Introduction People today are more health-conscious than at any other point in history. This is due to several factors which made people aware how precious good health can be. Among these are the increasing costs of health care, the need to maintain good health to stay competitive in the job markets and lately, the overall trend in populations in which there are more older and senior citizens than younger ones. This last factor is due to a combination of better health care which had resulted in longer lifespans and the reduced birth rates of modern societies. Various health movements likewise contributed to increasing health awareness such as the running or biking craze, exercise programs, the increasing prevalence of obesity, heart diseases, diabetes and other chronic ailments caused by unhealthy lifestyles such as smoking or drinking. The secret to happiness in life often depends on staying healthy. This means quality of life is important and not just having lived long enough to defy the mortality statistics. In other words, there is no point in having lived long if most of that life was spent in illness or injury and therefore, not a life lived to the fullest. Happiness and full life means living an active and independent life, especially during the sunset years. Health is definitely wealth, people say it quite often. Staying healthy is not only an individual's concern but also of governments due to increasing pressure on scarce or limited public health resources. Governments have a stake if their citizens stay healthy or not because sickly citizens do not markedly contribute to making a nation's economy grow more robustly but instead become a drain on public finances. Health promotion has been in fashion for the past several years already but it has become an urgent concern because of the graying of the population and increasing lifestyle diseases. Discussion Health can be defined several ways because it is quite a broad concept. This can only mean different societies can have different meanings as to what constitutes good health, all of it depending on how the concept of good health is acquired through socialization within limits of a society's culture and practices (Naidoo & Wills, 2000, p. 5). Health comes from the Old English word heal (hael) which means whole. The implication is that health should be viewed from a holistic approach that sees an individual patient's health as something consisting of the various elements of a person such as the mental, physical, emotional and even spiritual. Views of health can be limited to the strictly technical or medical viewpoint or it can be defined in a more philosophical or metaphysical sense. This is the contrast provided by the Western views of medicine and the Eastern approaches to health care such as those practiced by the TCM or traditional Chinese medicine and Indian practice of ayurveda (the science of life) that includes yoga, meditation, massage, diet and herbal medicines. Both TCM and ayurveda are part of the so-called complementary and alternative medical practices (CAM) of which the more famous ones are Chinese acupuncture and Indian homeopathy not accepted by Western medicine. Various Health Definitions – generally speaking, there are two views of what health is all about. The first is the negative viewpoint which sees good health as the absence of illness, infirmity, disability or disease which is the predominant view today based on the Western or a scientific conceptual model of health (ibid.) while the second is the positive view of health. In this latter definition, as given by the World Health Organization (WHO), health is not only the absence of illness or disease but the overall state of well-being which is a more holistic view. In this broader concept of good health, it defines being healthy as a full functioning of all the various dimensions of an individual's total health and how each dimension influences all other factors in an inter-related manner as parts of a composite whole (ibid. p. 6). Health Promotion – this phrase is a relatively new concept being promoted by public health agencies of the government. Previously, health promotion was primarily geared toward the propagation of health-related educational materials. Generally speaking, health promotion pertains to active interventions to encourage a healthy lifestyle to avoid or prevent the chronic ailments associated mostly with modern living. However, there are other aspects to promoting good health such as encouraging people to avail of health services whenever practicable, the public policies regarding a healthy environment (at home or at work) and those activities that educate people (the original definition used previously) about their physical health and how to stay healthy throughout their lives. Health promotion policies had been conceptualized which closely paralleled the contrasting definitions of health mentioned earlier – whether it is a state of well-being or wellness (positive view) or absence of a disease or ailment (negative view). The concept of health promotion can be best viewed as an umbrella term that pertains to a wide range of disciplines focused on improving the health status of an entire population (Green & Tones, 2010, p. 16). In this regard, health education has re-acquired its importance in previous years because today, health education had become marginalized in the entire setup of health promotion. It is being used again to emphasize the importance of individual choices in attainment of good health and as a key driver for advocacies in the field of public health. A clear example of how health education is newly critical to various health promotion programs formulated by the government is in targeting a variety of behavioral changes in the general population as it relates to weight loss, obesity, exercise, nutrition, a good diet or stress reduction techniques (Rohrer, Naessens, Liesinger & Litchy, 2010, p. 92). In addition, health promotion requires health education pertaining to big risk factors like smoking and alcohol. A main difficulty in defining health promotion is absence of professional standards for practice of health promotion as a distinct medical field or as an entirely new discipline. I would be more inclined to use the definition of good health as given by the WHO as it is more comprehensive (holistic) in its approach and therefore serves the purpose better. As a consequence, this also relates to the way health promotion is defined nowadays which is the educational approach which believes people will act accordingly to preserve their good health if they are better informed to make good choices. This supersedes the previous concept of the health promotion campaign as mainly a preventive approach to attaining good health in entire populations. The preventive approach used psychology theories in attempts to change human behavior while the educational approach lets people decide on their own based on knowledge. The definition of health as espoused by the World Health Organization is more attuned to modern times because of its totality. People not only have physical, emotional and mental requirements as discussed earlier but also social and sexual needs that need to be taken into account, which is why the WHO approach is better in this regard compared to the Western model that looks at health in a very narrow sense in a negative manner instead of positively. A common failure among many health promotion programs is the lack of a common metric that will exactly measure how the programs achieved the stated aims as discussed by Rohrer et al. Most Appealing – the positive definition of health as conceptualized by the WHO is a more useful concept because it stresses on the positive aspects of health as wellness instead of the negative view which is the absence of disease or illness. Health promotion that is a more appealing prospect to me entails the newer definition of active interventions designed to have a healthier general population instead of the earlier preventive approach using psychology as it implies a coercive approach to changing human behavior with regard to health matters. The educational approach is more attractive in tune with today's more activist citizenry in which a lot of people take active participation in the delivery and consumption of health care. This is a more appropriate approach because it allows people enough leeway to decide on their own. Direct Relation – once health is defined more comprehensively as that used by WHO, it can be easily related to health promotion which is also a comprehensive approach to having good health that encompasses not only primary medical care but also other aspects promoting good health like public sanitation, proper nutrition, right education, housing and agriculture. In my area of nursing practice which is acute care, the idea of health and health promotion is highlighted in the way health promotion could have prevented various diseases I saw in most of the patients. I had once been assigned to the adult intensive care unit of a major hospital in which I saw how most patients with chronic ailments like heart disease or diabetes could have avoided their pitiful medical conditions if only they had followed health programs promoted by the government such as lifestyle-change behavior modifications. The adult ICU required constant monitoring of physically unstable patients due to the critical nature of their ailment such as cardiac monitoring systems, mechanical ventilators or continuous renal replacement equipment due to end-stage renal disease from complications of diabetes which was entirely preventable in the first place if people changed eating habits. The four concepts of health practices are health promotion, illness prevention, restoration of good health and lastly, patient rehabilitation. In my area of nursing practice which is critical care, a key prevalent feature in terms of being most used is restoration of good health although there are times when this seems like a quixotic or hopeless task as most patients are chronically ill. The WHO definition of health and the more modern concept of health promotion that is educational is more appropriate or conducive to my specific area of nursing practice as the two concepts deal more with lifestyle diseases which come about due to the long-term habits of people who eventually get afflicted. Chronic diseases do not happen overnight but over a period of years of unhealthy living practices, sometimes for a major part of patients' lives. It is a type of health promotion geared more towards the healthy relatives than on a patient. Utilizing Theories into Actual Practice – having defined health and health promotion, it might be helpful to give a clearer distinction between disease and illness which are too often used interchangeably and confused with each other by ordinary people. Disease is properly defined as a state of ill health which can be verified by another person (objective proof) while illness is the loss of good health experienced by an individual due to feelings of discomfort or even great pain (subjective) although disease and illness can overlap (Naidoo & Wills, p. 7). A major objective of health promotion is to achieve the aims of public health policy which is the attainment of social health – the degree by which people function as members of their own or local communities and intrinsically linked to the concept of social capital and quality of life. Conclusion Doctors and nurses are primarily the link between health promotion and the prevention of certain diseases associated with certain risky behaviors such as smoking, drinking or illegal drug use. In this regard, they provide the necessary health education activities required to help individuals avoid the onset of diseases (primary prevention), prevent further progression of a disease once diagnosed through use of appropriate health care (secondary prevention) and by the elimination of pain and further suffering through palliative care (tertiary prevention). Health promotion has come a long way from its early days as a tool for epidemiology. Today, health promotion is more focused on building social capital because besides common risk factors like smoking, drinking or lack of adequate exercise, researchers found out there is also a direct inverse link between social connections and death rates in a given population. It simply means health promotion planning and public health policies are to be shifted to a more holistic approach that promotes social health (Lucas & Lloyd, 2005, p. 136) and not merely as usual disease prevention as the primary aim. Additionally, new measures should be developed for evaluating the effectiveness of health promotion programs (Whitehead, 2003, p. 490). Reference List Green, J. & Tones, K. (2010). Health Promotion: Planning and Strategies. Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: Sage Publications, Ltd. Lucas, K. & Lloyd, B. B. (2005). Health Promotion: Evidence and Experience. London, UK: Sage Publications, Ltd. Naidoo, J. & Wills, J. (2000). Health Promotion: Foundations for Practice. Philadelphia, PA, USA: Elsevier Health Sciences. Rohrer, J. E., Naessens, J. M., Liesinger, J. & Litchy, W. (2010 April). “Comparing Diverse Health Promotion Programs Using Overall Self-rated Health as a Common Metric.” Population Health Management, 13 (2), 91-5. Whitehead, D. (2003). “Evaluating Health Promotion: A Model for Nursing Practice.” Journal of Advanced Nursing, 41 (5), 490-8. Read More