Health Behavior and Health Education

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Health Behavior and Health Education
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What Is Health Education?

• health education attempts to close the gap
  between what is known about optimum health
  practice and that which is actually practiced.
  (Griffiths, 1972)
• any combination of learning experiences designed
  to facilitate voluntary adaptations of behavior
  conducive to health. (Green, 1980)

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Purpose of Health Education

• To change individual behavior
• To change behavior of enough individuals that
  overall statistics will change.
• To achieve change through a variety of techniques
• motivate individuals to change
• force individuals to change

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Where Did Health Education Come From?

• Three main settings
• Communities
• Schools
• Patient care sites

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Changes in Health Education

• Changes in the prevalent health issues at
  individual, community, and national level have
  driven different perspective of how we do health
  education.
• Leading causes of morbidity (acute to chronic)
• Leading causes of mortality (lifestyle issues)
• This has led to a shift from the 1970s 1980s
  emphasis on health as an individual level issue
  to our current recognition of the broader social
  influences on health

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Bottom Line

• Health education is concerned not only with
  the individuals and their families, but also with
  the institutions and social conditions that
  impede or facilitate individuals toward achieving
  optimum health. (Griffiths, 1972)

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Health Promotion

• United States the science and art of helping
  people change their lifestyle toward a state of
  optimum health. (ODonnell, 1989).
• Canada the process of enabling people to
  increase control over, and to improve, their
  health.reducing inequities, extending.prevention
  , and helping people to cope with their
  circumstances.creating environments conducive to
  health, in which people are better able to take
  care of themselves. (Epp, 1986)

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Health Behavior

• The actions of individuals, groups, and
  organizations as well as the determinants,
  correlates, and consequences of these actions.
• Social change
• Policy development and implementation
• Improved coping skills
• Enhanced quality of life
• Etc.

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Where Does Health Education Happen?

• Everywhere!
• Schools
• Communities
• Worksites
• Health Care Sites
• Homes
• Consumer Marketplace

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Who Receives Health Education?

• Potentially, everyone and anyone.
• To be effective, though, health education efforts
  must be tailored correctly for the recipients
  (target audience), their health status, and their
  beliefs, attitudes, skills, and past behaviors.

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Target Audience Analysis

• In a very real sense, much of what we will be
  doing this semester is designed to help us
  understand the audience of our health education
  programming.
• Youll be doing the hard-core programming side of
  it HST 4250, but what you do in that class is
  built on what you learn in this class.

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Key Factors to Remember

• SES
• Ethnicity
• Life Cycle Stage
• Health Status (disease status)
• Risk status
• Power Gap
• Accessibility of Services

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The Challenge

• Understanding and improving health is the central
  challenge of public policy today.
• But.in order to create sound policy (the most
  efficient way to effect some types of health
  behavior and health status change), sound,
  accurate information about health behavior change
  is needed.