Promoting Positive Health Behaviors - Article Example

Summary of Every Woman Matters Program The Every Woman Matters Program (EWM) was designed to promote preventive healthcare service to females. The specific preventive healthcare strategies aimed at were improved screening of breast and cervical cancer. To this end, the program targeted healthcare providers with an aim of promoting practice change in their operations. Consequently, the EWM program utilized the GAPS model procedure to device interventions within the healthcare provider practice (Backer et al. 2005). These interventions would be targeted at removing obstacles towards preventive breast and cervical cancer.

As a result, the achievable goals set were; to increase public awareness pertaining to the risk of breast and cervical cancer. Moreover, it aimed to increase awareness on the benefits of screening. Furthermore, the program aimed at reducing the cost of screening to low income females. The practice based interventions employed were based on case studies conducted with seven individual practices. The core aims of the practice intervention were to; aid the practices identify obstacles pertaining to the delivery of screening services.

Second, was to aid the practices in creating plans for mitigation of the barriers. Third was to promote the services of the EWM program to females from low incomes. Despite these well articulated goals, the EWM program fell short of achieving its core objective. Reasons for Ineffectiveness of the EWM Program The overall aim of the EWM program was to increase the level of breast and cervical cancer screening among healthcare practices. However, the program was not effective in achieving its objective due to myriad of reasons.

Foremost, the practice change method for promoting EWM program lacked the sufficient support and leadership role by the leaders in the healthcare providers. The successful implementation of the goals for promoting preventive healthcare for women requires the motivational factor and sense of leadership from heads of practices. Consequently, the program was ineffective since the momentum for promoting the program was not spearheaded by some of the leaders across the practices. A second plausible reason for the failure of the program was the insufficient level of teamwork between support staff and leader of the respective practices.

Consequently, the lack of synergy in implementing the EWM program resulted in the over burdening of either the support staff or leaders. Third pertains to the issue of disparities in resources among the various healthcare practices. The healthcare practices all had different amounts of resources available to them based on their organizational capacities. Furthermore, the health care practices were operating within the limits of their resources. Consequently, additional resources for the EWM program were not sufficiently explored within the action plans for each healthcare practice.

The fourth reason for the ineffectiveness of the EWM program was the insufficient public awareness creation mechanism pertaining to the need for screening. The need for successful increase in screening of breast and cervical cancer requires sufficient and mandatory public awareness. Consequently, the program was ineffective owing to insufficient efforts aimed at promoting community outreach through a variety of media such as increased free testing clinics and radio programs. Characteristics of