Health Promotion and Disease Prevention

Introduction

Improving the lives of individuals and communities depend on disease prevention and health promotion to facilitate better health. Individual and community behaviours play significant roles in deterring health outcomes. Choices such as lack of physical exercise, unhealthy diets, and substance abuse result in adverse health outcomes. Disease prevention and health promotion are essential in facilitating improved health for individuals and communities. This paper focuses on the concepts of disease prevention and health promotion, elaborating on their importance in reducing risk factors and adopting healthy behaviors as ways of promoting health and wellbeing,

• A description of disease prevention.

Disease prevention entails the process through which persons, especially those at the risk of contracting certain diseases, are treated as a way of preventing the occurrence of the disease. It is different from treatment as it is performed before the onset of the symptoms of the disease (Khoury, 2018). It entails specific individual or community-based interventions to minimize the likelihood of various diseases.

•  An example of an existing disease prevention model at the three levels of practice (community,

A disease prevention model that is used at the three levels, including community, systems, and individual levels, is the Health Belief Model. The model is a theoretical model that facilitates guidelines for health promotion and disease prevention programs. It facilitates explanations and predictions of individual changes in health behaviours. It also promotes the understanding of health behaviours. The main element of the Health Belief Model is the focus on individuals relating to health conditions (Sulat et al., 2018). It consequently facilitates the prediction of health-related behaviours. It focuses on defining the main factors that affect health as perceived individual threats to diseases, perceived severity, and the possible positive benefits of actions that could be engaged in the disease prevention process. The Health Benefit model is effective for both short-term and long-term interventions. It focuses on information gathering through engaging in health needs assessments and other efforts to determine the persons at risk of contracting a specific disease. It also elaborates the consequences of the adverse health issues related to various risk behaviors in ways that are clear and easily understood by the target populations in outlining the perceived severity (Sulat et al., 2018). The model is further effective in elaborating the necessary steps and procedures involved in taking the recommended actions for disease prevention. The benefits of the model further include that it facilitates the identification of the necessary measures for reducing barriers to disease prevention activities. The model is further effective in demonstrating actions through developing skills and facilitating support that promotes self-efficacy and the possibility of successful behavior changes.

• An analysis of the benefits and concerns of utilizing this model

The benefit of the Health Belief Model is that it’s difficult to convince people to change their behavior without explaining the dangers of the behaviors (Shmueli, 2021). Essentially people hardly give up something they enjoy in case theory do not get anything in return. For instance, a person may not stop smoking if they do not believe that by doing so, they would be improving their health. Also, a community may not agree to vaccinate if they do not believe it would protect them from contracting a disease. The benefits further facilitate promoting behavior that is considered effective for disease prevention. The assertion includes that following the belief that getting regular exercise and engaging in healthy eating could prevent heart disease, the belief could be essential in increasing the perceived benefits of the behaviors.

The model’s concerns include that despite needing behavior change, people fail to change their behavior as they think it would be hard. Additionally, engaging in behavior change could require significant money, time, and effort (Shmueli, 2021). The challenges of using the method go beyond physical and social difficulties. For instance, if the people around a person engage in a specific behavior, it would be difficult for the person intending to go through a behavior change to effectively achieve the goal.

• A description of health promotion.

Health promotion relates to the process that enables people to increase the level of control over their health to improve the quality of their health. It entails more than the need to control individual health and is instead concerned with creating an increased range of social and environmental interventions (Phillips, A. (2019). In public health practice, it is essential to support communities, governments, and individuals to death with their various health challenges. Health promotion is achieved by creating supportive environments, healthy public policy, and strengthening community actions and personal skills.

• An example of an existing health promotion model at the three levels of practice (community, systems, and individual).

A health model that can be used for health promotion is the Pender health model. The health promotion model was developed in 1982 by doctor Nola Pender. It is aimed at helping patients to achieve optimal health and wellbeing. The creation of the model resulted from the work of Pender on studying health promotion and prevention behaviors. According to the model, all people have individual characteristics and life experiences that directly affect their decisions and actions relating to their health (Fathhi et al., 2019). The model does not solely define health as the absence of disease; instead, it focuses on health as the state of wellbeing. It has been severally revised after its creation, significantly influencing other theorists’ work. Some of the main concepts attributed to the model include the person, their environment, health, and the nursing process. The model focuses on the person as the central focus of the model. The person’s experiences and attributes directly affect the decisions and actions they are likely to take. According to the model, it is necessary to assess the learned behaviors gained through family community and the environments (Fathhi et al., 2019). The earned behaviors affect the ability of individuals to participate in health promotion behaviors. In this case, the environment is a person’s physical, economic, and social conditions. A healthy environment is free of toxins, has economic stability, and allows access to resources that facilitate the access to resources with the likelihood of promoting healthy living. The individual definition of health directly affects the promotion of wellbeing and disease prevention.

• An analysis of the benefits and concerns with utilizing this model.

The benefits of the model include that it is a conceptual model that can be used to develop middle-range theories. The model is an application in health promotion as it can be used across all populations. The health promotion model includes behaviors for improving health and applies across a person’s lifespan (Fathhi et al., 2019). The model is also easy to understand and relates to everyday situations; consequently, it allows the application of the concepts to different types of persons. The benefits of the model further include that it enables nurses to create measures for enabling nurses to assist individuals in developing and practicing healthy habits as a way of preventing the occurrence of diseases.

The limitation of the Pender health model is that the scope of the model elaborates only on the behaviors focused on health promotion and disease prevention (Fathhi et al., 2019). The model would not work when individuals are unwilling or unable to change the behaviors perceived as negatively affecting their health. Individuals must be self-motivated and willing to undergo behavioral change if they are to benefit from the model.

• A discussion of evidence-based practice’s role in disease prevention and health promotion success.

Evidence-based practice has an essential role in the processes of disease prevention and health promotion. It facilitates the development, implementation, and evaluation of effective programs and policies in public health. It works through applying principles of scientific reasoning, such as the systematic use of data and information systems (Fernandez et al., 2019). It also works through efficient behavioral science theory and program planning models. Through the use of the evidence-based practice, disease prevention and health promotion are facilitated following the combination of individual clinical expertise with the possible best scientific evidence.

Additionally, the evidence-based practice focuses on principles of good practice. It integrates sound and professional judgments with the appropriate, systematic research to facilitate disease prevention and health promotion (Fernandez et al., 2019). Additionally, there has been a strong recognition in public health of the need to identify the evidence of the effectiveness of different policies and programs and further translate the generated evidence into recommendations. The process is thought as effective in increasing the use of evidence in public health practice.

• Discuss the role of health teaching in disease prevention and health promotion.

Health teaching is an essential strategy in disease prevention and health promotion programs. Health education facilitates learning experiences on public health topics. These topics are essential in facilitating strategies that are specifically aimed at specific target populations (Vries et al., 2018). Health education presents necessary information relating to different health topics to different populations. It facilitates outlining health benefits and threats that are likely to face specific populations due to different behaviors. Further, health education facilitates the necessary tools to facilitate capacity building and supportive behavior change in an appropriate setting.

Conclusion

Individual and community wellness depend on disease prevention and health promotion in facilitating guidelines for healthy living. The two concepts work concurrently in facilitating improved health outcomes through driving behavior change for the adoption of good and healthy behaviors. These strategies depend on various health models, including the Health belief model for disease prevention and the Pender health model for health promotion. The various models are effective in facilitating godliness for driving behavior change for better health outcomes.

References

Fathhi, S., Mohamadian, H., & Latifi, S. M. (2019). Effective components of the commitment to do and maintain physical activity based on the Pender health promotion model in Middle-aged women of the Southern regions of Iran during 2018. Community Health Journal, 13(4), 75-85. http://chj.rums.ac.ir/article_105941.html

Fernandez, M. E., Ruiter, R. A., Markham, C. M., & Kok, G. (2019). Intervention mapping: theory-and evidence-based health promotion program planning: perspective and examples. Frontiers in Public Health, 7, 209. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2019.00209

Khoury, M. J. (2018). From genes to public health: the applications of genetic technology in disease prevention. The Ethics of Public Health, 371-376. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cct.2021.106425

Phillips, A. (2019). Effective approaches to health promotion in nursing practice. Nursing Standard. http://doi.org/10.7748/ns.2019.e11312

Shmueli, L. (2021). Predicting intention to receive COVID-19 vaccine among the general population using the health belief model and the theory of planned behavior model. BMC Public Health, 21(1), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-10816-7

Sulat, J. S., Prabandari, Y. S., Sanusi, R., Hapsari, E. D., & Santoso, B. (2018). The validity of health belief model variables in predicting behavioral change: A scoping review. Health Education. https://doi.org/10.1108/HE-05-2018-0027

Vries, H. D., Kremers, S. P., & Lippke, S. (2018). Health education and promotion: Key concepts and exemplary evidence to support them. In Principles and concepts of behavioral medicine (pp. 489-532). Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-93826-4_17