Theoretical foundations of health education and health promotion
Health education is a promotion of understanding on how to maintain personal health. It has its foundations in biological, physical, psychological and medical sciences. The purpose of health education is to promote health. Prevent diseases, disability as well premature death. Health educators help to achieve these basics through education-driven voluntary activities that change behavior.
The history of organized health education began a few decades ago during Greek ancient times when they knew that a person's environment, activities, and diet play a role in contracting diseases and not the supernatural. The contemporary view of health education began around the 1970S when the then President of the USA Richard Nixon create a President’s committee on health education. It initiated developments such as the creation of the department of education which is now the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Center for Health Education.
Purpose and Importance of Health Education
The main point of health education is drawing knowledge from many sources including biology, medicine, psychological and ecology among others. The knowledge from these and other field is what practitioners use to promote a person's health, prevent and probably cure a disease. Health education is tailored for an individual, a group or general public to helps them gain skills in promoting, maintaining, improving and restoring their or somebody’s health.
Health education improves aims at achieving the following:
- Improve the health status of an individual, family, community, and nation
- Enhance the quality of life for all people
- Reduces costs that individuals, families, communities, medical facilities and insurance companies spend on medical treatment. It also saves the cost for states and nation.
The providers of health education are specialists with training or certification in health education. Modern health education requires intensive specialized study before someone can provide health education. It is something that health trainers in the USA take seriously. More than 250 colleges and universities in the United States offer both graduate and undergraduate degree, community health education, health promotion and other relating studies.
Health Promotion
Health promotion is a process of enabling people to increase control and improve their health. Health promotion comes from a set of actions that foster good health and well being. It is not a 'promotion' as people understand it when you consider it in a strict sense. Informing people about ways of looking after their health is just a part of it. These are the actions that contribute to achieving health promotion. Inform people about things to do and to stay healthy Address the elements in a community without influence on health and wellbeing because they require support.
Health Promotion Activities
Health promotion activities are the things that health educators gear towards promotion of health and prevention of ill-health instead of narrowing the focus on the people who are at risk of contracting specific diseases. The result is to achieve the following:
- Enable people to increase their control over their health and improve
- Involve entire populations in the context of everyday lives
Health promotion aims at influencing the behavior of people and organizations for them to take responsibility for causing health problems even to others by behavior such as smoking through means such as an advertisement. Unlike health education, it is not subject that schools teach.
Health promotion strives to shift the focus of responsibility from health professionals and the government to the people and organizations by raising their levels of awareness about diseases and preventing d infections that healthy behaviors as well as attitudes.
The objectives and aims of health education overlap but they use different approaches to reach the audience. Health education takes the form of field study while the advertisement is the way that health promotion takes to make people change their attitudes.
