Promoting Health and Well Being - Essay Example

"Promoting Health and Well Being" is a perfect example of a paper on wellness and lifestyle. According to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, lack of physical activity is among the four key causes of chronic conditions and the general lack of health and wellbeing. Poor diets, physical inactivity, alcohol, and tobacco are key contributors to preventable diseases, accounting for £9.4 billion direct costs per year to the NHS and 42 percent of deaths in the United Kingdom (Davies, 2011).  To maintain health and promote wellbeing, people can use primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention methods. Primary prevention is undertaken before illness sets in while secondary prevention is concerned with fairly early identification of illness before it causes considerable damage. Tertiary prevention is mainly about slowing down or containing the damage that is already caused. Ewles and Simnett (1999) proposed five health promotion approaches. This paper will describe how the Behavior Change or Lifestyle Approach was used to promote the health and wellbeing of a 17-year-old patient suffering from diabetes and obesity. It will further discuss the advantages of the approach.

             Diabetes and obesity are greatly associated with lifestyle (Department of Health, 2010). For the 17-year-old patient, his lifestyle had been characterized by a significant lack of physical activity, which is detrimental to his already fragile condition. The aim of the approach, which is usually targeted at individuals, was to encourage him to adopt healthy behaviors that would be beneficial to his health. One key assumption that Ewles and Simnett made in this approach was that health is considered as an individual’s property. By choosing to change his lifestyle, the patient would realize notable improvements to his health. Although it is a patient’s responsibility to take action towards looking after themselves, the Behaviour Change of Lifestyle Approach is a top-down method, which means it must involve the health promoters setting priorities (Ewles & Simnett, 1999). The patient had to start with an attitude change, followed by behavior change while the health promoters used the resources and power at their disposal to impose ideas and make decisions on what had to be done by the patient.

            At the age of 17, the patient had already indulged in alcohol consumption and tobacco smoking. A healthy diet was prescribed for him, as well as a physical exercise program that was supervised by a professional trainer, and he was also required to quit smoking and taking alcohol. The patient was made to understand that unhealthy choices in lifestyle such as poor diet, lack of activity, and smoking are significant, as well as preventable, causes of lasting conditions. Equally important to a healthy diet and physical exercise, enough sleep and rest were included in the program. The aim was to reduce obesity as a means of managing diabetes. The key advantage of this approach is that it does not overemphasize the absence of disease but rather, shifts focus towards the promotion of positive health (Bernstein, 2010). It enhances the environmental and social dimensions of health because it is not based on a medical description of wellbeing. Another advantage of the approach is that its evaluation is theoretically simple because it is possible to determine whether the patient’s health behavior changed after the intervention of health promoters (Naidoo & Wills, 2000).

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