4.21.3 Lesson: Health Promotion

HEALTH PROMOTION

Objective:

G.6 – Students will promote community health promotion and/or disease prevention projects.

What is Health Promotion?

Health promotion is developing individual, group, institutional, community, and systemic strategies to improve health knowledge, attitudes, skills, and behavior.  A purpose of health promotion is to positively influence the health behavior of individuals and communities.  Another purpose of health promotion is to positively influence any living and working conditions that influence their health.

The World Health Organization defines health promotion as: “The process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health.  It moves beyond a focus on individual behavior towards a wide range of social and environmental interventions.”

The Importance of Health Promotion

Health promotion is important for a number of reasons, and some of those reasons include the following.

• Health promotion improves the health status of individuals, families, communities, states, and the nation.
• Health promotion enhances the quality of life for all people.
• Health promotion reduces premature deaths.
• By focusing on prevention, health promotion reduces the costs (both financial and human) that individuals, employers, families, insurance companies, medical facilities, communities, the state, and the nation would spend on medical treatment.

Health Promotion and You

During this module, you are learning about different diseases and chronic conditions.  Many of those diseases are preventable.  At the same time, many of those diseases comprise the leading causes of death, disease and disability (cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic lung diseases, depression, violence, substance abuse, injuries, nutritional deficiencies, HIV/AIDS, and helminth infections, etc.), and they can be significantly reduced by preventing six interrelated categories of behavior.  Most of those behaviors begin during childhood or young adulthood, that are initiated during youth and fostered by social and political policies and conditions.  Some of those behaviors include:

• Tobacco use (smoking, chewing tobacco)
• Behaviors that results in injury and violence (gang involvement, taking unnecessary risks)
• Alcohol and substance use (beer and other beverages that contain alcohol, drug use)
• Dietary and hygienic practices that cause disease (failing to wash hands regularly, not brushing teeth, eating too many foods that are high in sugar, fat, and empty calories)
• Sedentary lifestyle (being inactive; not getting enough exercise)
• Sexual behavior that causes unintended pregnancy and disease (abstinence the best way to avoid these)

Thus, it is important that you never start any of these habits or behaviors.

Health Promotion Project

As part of this lesson, you will write a short essay (at least 400 words) about what it means to be healthy and how you can have an impact in your community.  For this essay, you will need to answer the following questions:

1. What is health promotion?
2. What does it mean to be healthy?
3. What are some of the major health issues in my community?  (You will need to be specific.  For example: living in an area where many people smoke; little access to fresh produce; many people are sedentary and/or overweight or obese; litter problems; many fast food restaurants that do not offer healthy fare; etc.)
4. What are some things you can change in your own life to be healthier?
5. What are some of the things you can do to increase awareness of preventable health issues and encourage people in your community to lead healthier lives?  (You must be specific.  For example, you can write an article for your local newspaper, organize a community garden, or anything else that you feel might increase awareness.  You will not have to do what you recommend, but you do need to think of at least one or two examples.)

You will work on this assignment today and tomorrow, and you will turn in your paper tomorrow.  The paper must be written in a Word document and uploaded in the assignment link provided in tomorrow’s lesson.  The essay will be worth 50 points.

Do not forget that tomorrow you will submit the answers to the five questions included in the lesson.

NOTE: Assessment questions are not available for tthis lesson in this preview course.