Question

explain how Community health education is preventive tool to combat community health problems.

Answer 1

Health promotion and disease prevention programs focus on keeping people healthy. Health promotion engages and empowers individuals and communities to engage in healthy behaviors, and make changes that reduce the risk of developing chronic diseases and other morbidities.

The WHO 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.”

Preventive health is growing in popularity as people seek to improve their overall health and wellness by making better choices. Nurse practitioners are greatly involved with this effort, since preventive health can reduce and prevent disease.

Disease prevention focuses on prevention strategies to reduce the risk of developing chronic diseases and other morbidities.

Health promotion and disease prevention programs often address social determinants of health, which influence modifiable risk behaviors. Social determinants of health are the economic, social, cultural, and political conditions in which people are born, grow, and live that affect health status. Modifiable risk behaviors include, for example, tobacco use, poor eating habits, and lack of physical activity, which contribute to the development of chronic disease. Typical activities for health promotion and disease prevention programs include:

Communication: Raising awareness about healthy behaviors for the general public. Examples of communication strategies include public service announcements, health fairs, mass media campaigns, and newsletters.
Education: Empowering behavior change and actions through increased knowledge. Examples of health education strategies include courses, trainings, and support groups.
Policy: Regulating or mandating activities by organizations or public agencies that encourage healthy decision-making.
Environment: Changing structures or environments to make healthy decisions more readily available to large populations.

Community health is a major field of study within the medical and clinical sciences which focuses on the maintenance, protection and improvement of the health status of population groups and communities as opposed to the health of individual patients. It is a distinct field of study that may be taught within a separate school of public health or environmental health.

The WHO defines community health as: environmental, social, and economic resources to sustain emotional and physical well being among people in ways that advance their aspirations and satisfy their needs in their unique environment.

Medical interventions that occur in communities can be classified as three categories: primary healthcare, secondary healthcare, and tertiary healthcare. Community health is rooted within primary healthcare achievements. Primary healthcare programs aim to reduce risk factors and increase health promotion and prevention. Secondary healthcare is related to "hospital care" where acute care is administered in a hospital department setting. Tertiary healthcare refers to highly specialized care usually involving disease or disability management.

The success of community health programmes relies upon the transfer of information from health professionals to the general public using one-to-one or one to many communication (mass communication). The latest shift is towards health marketing.

Categories of community health
Primary healthcare and primary prevention
Community based health promotion emphasizes primary prevention and population based perspective. It is the goal of community health to have individuals in a certain community improve their lifestyle or seek medical attention. Primary healthcare is provided by health professionals, specifically the ones a patient sees first that may refer them to secondary or tertiary care. Primary prevention refers to the early avoidance and identification of risk factors that may lead to certain diseases and disabilities. Community focused efforts including immunizations, classroom teaching, and awareness campaigns are all good examples of how primary prevention techniques are utilized by communities to change certain health behaviors. Prevention programs, if carefully designed and drafted, can effectively prevent problems that children and adolescents face as they grow up. This finding also applies to all groups and classes of people. Prevention programs are one of the most effective tools health professionals can use to greatly impact individual, population, and community health.

Secondary healthcare and secondary prevention
Community health can also be improved with improvements in individuals' environments. Community health status is determined by the environmental characteristics, behavioral characteristics, social cohesion in the environment of that community. Appropriate modifications in the environment can help to prevent unhealthy behaviors and negative health outcomes. Secondary prevention refers to improvements made in a patient's lifestyle or environment after the onset of disease or disability. This sort of prevention works to make life easier for the patient, since it's too late to prevent them from their current disease or disability. An example of secondary prevention is when those with occupational low back pain are provided with strategies to stop their health status from worsening; the prospects of secondary prevention may even hold more promise than primary prevention in this case.

Tertiary healthcare
In tertiary healthcare, community health can only be affected with professional medical care involving the entire population. Patients need to be referred to specialists and undergo advanced medical treatment. In some countries, there are more sub-specialties of medical professions than there are primary care specialists. Health inequalities are directly related to social advantage and social resources.