Question

For communication Strategies for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.

Explain the role of health literacy in health promotion and disease prevention strategies.

Answer 1

Ans. Health promotion and disease prevention programs can improve health at every stage of life. To achieve this, there are several strategies for integrating health promotion and disease prevention perspectives into everyday practice.

Health communication : health communication includes verbal and written strategies to influence and empower individuals, populations, and communities to make healthier choices. Health communication often integrates components of multiple theories and models to promote positive changes in attitudes and behaviors. Health communication is related to social marketing, which involves the development of activities and interventions designed to positively change behaviors.

Use of research-based strategies to shape materials and products and to select the channels that deliver them to the intended audience.

Understanding of conventional wisdom, concepts, language, and priorities for different cultures and settings.

Consideration of health literacy, internet access, media exposure, and cultural competency of target populations.

Development of materials such as brochures, billboards, newspaper articles, television broadcasts, radio commercials, public service announcements, newsletters, pamphlets, videos, digital tools, case studies, group discussions, health fairs, field trips, and workbooks among others media outlets.

Using a variety of communication channels can allow health messages to shape mass media or interpersonal, small group, or community level campaigns. Health communication strategies aim to change people's knowledge, attitudes, and/or behaviors; for example:

Increase risk perception

Reinforce positive behaviors

Influence social norms

Increase availability of support and needed services

Empower individuals to change or improve their health conditions

Examples of media strategies to convey health messages include the following components:

Radio

Television

Newspaper

Brochures

Internet

Social media tools.

When designing health communication or social marketing strategies, it is important to consider the overall communication goals of the intervention. It is also necessary to understand the target population so that the content created is relevant to the target population. It is important to tailor messages to the communication channel being used. Further, using multiple communication and media strategies will ensure a broader reach. It is also important to ensure that the target population has access to the communication channels being used.

Health education : health education is one strategy for implementing health promotion and disease prevention programs. Health education provides learning experiences on health topics. Health education strategies are tailored for their target population. Health education presents information to target populations on particular health topics, including the health benefits/threats they face, and provides tools to build capacity and support behavior change in an appropriate setting.

Examples of health education activities include:

Lectures

Courses

Seminars

Webinars

Workshops

Classes

Characteristics of health education strategies include:

Participation of the target population.

Completion of a community needs assessment to identify community capacity, resources, priorities, and needs.

Planned learning activities that increase participants' knowledge and skills.

Implementation of programs with integrated, well-planned curricula and materials that take place in a setting convenient for participants.

Presentation of information with audiovisual and computer based supports such as slides and projectors, videos, books, CDs, posters, pictures, websites, or software programs.

Ensuring proficiency of program staff, through training, to maintain fidelity to the program model.

Health education activities should enhance the overall goal of the health promotion and disease prevention program. Materials developed for health education programs must be culturally appropriate and tailored to the target populations to ensure cultural competence. In rural communities, this means addressing cultural and linguistic differences, and addressing potential barriers to health promotion and disease prevention in rural areas.

Policy, Systems, and Environmental Change : health promotion and disease prevention strategies to be successful, policies, systems, and environments must be supportive of health. Policy, systems, and environmental change strategies are designed to promote healthy behaviors by making healthy choices readily available and easily accessible in the community. PSE change strategies are designed with sustainability in mind.

Policy Change : Policy is a tool for achieving health promotion and disease prevention program goals. Policy decisions are made by organizations, agencies, and stakeholders. Policy approaches include legislative advocacy, fiscal measures, taxation, and regulatory oversight. Examples of health promotion and disease prevention policy approaches include:

Establishing policies for smoke-free zones and public events

Establishing healthy food options in vending machines in public places

Adding a tax to unhealthy food options

Requiring the use of safety equipment in a work setting to avoid injury

State and local governments often implement policy interventions for rural tobacco prevention and control. Models for state and local governments are available in the Rural Tobacco Control and Prevention Tooki.

Systems Change : Systems change refers to a fundamental shift in the way problems are solved. Within an organization, systems change affects organizational purpose, function, and connections by addressing organizational culture, beliefs, relationships, policies, and goals. Examples of systems change in health promotion and disease prevention include:

Developing plans for implementing new interventions and processes

Adapting or replicating a proven health promotion model

Implementing new technologies

Creating training or certification systems that align with policies

Environmental Change : Environmental change strategies involve changing the economic, social, or physical surroundings or contexts that affect health outcomes. Environmental strategies address population health outcomes and are best used in combination with other strategies. Examples of environmental strategies for health promotion and disease prevention include: Increasing the number of parks, greenways, and trails in the community.

Installing signs that promote use of walking and biking paths.

Increasing the availability of fresh, healthy foods in schools, restaurants, and cafeterias.

PSE change strategies have the potential to create positive changes in different settings. PSE change strategies are often complex, as they attempt to drive change at multiple levels . PSE change strategies are therefore useful in addressing chronic diseases and other complex health problems, such as obesity and diabetes.

Ans. Health literacy is linked to literacy and entails people's knowledge, motivation and competences to access, understand, appraise, and apply health information in order to make judgments and take decisions in everyday life concerning healthcare, disease prevention and health promotion to maintain or improve quality of life.

Health literacy is a term increasing importance in public health and healthcare. It is concerned with the capacities of people to meet the complex demands of health in a modern society . Health literate means placing one's own health and that of one's family and community into context, understanding which factors are influencing it, and knowing how to address them. An individual with an adequate level of health literacy has the ability to take responsibility for one's own health as well as one's family health and community health.

Firstly, health literacy is a multidimensional concept and consists of different components. Secondly, most conceptual models not only consider the key components of health literacy, but also identify the individual and system-level factors that influence a person's level of health literacy, as well as the pathways that link health literacy to health outcomes.

The conceptual framework presented in this paper provides this integration in the form of a comprehensive model. Based on a systematic review of existing definitions and conceptualizations of health literacy, it combines the qualities of a conceptual model outlining the most comprehensive dimensions of health literacy, and of a logical model, showing the proximal and distal factors which impact on health literacy as well as the pathways linking health literacy to health outcomes. Specifically, the model identifies 12 dimensions of health literacy, referring to the competencies related to accessing, understanding, appraising and applying health information in the domains of healthcare, disease prevention and health promotion, respectively.

Health literacy into an encompassing model outlining the main dimensions of health literacy as well as its determinants and the pathways to health outcomes. More importantly, however, it can also support the practice of healthcare, disease prevention and health promotion by serving as a conceptual basis to develop health literacy enhancing interventions. Moreover, it can contribute to the empirical work on health literacy by serving as a basis for the development of measurement tools. As currently available tools to measure health literacy do not capture all aspects of the concept as discussed in the literature, there is a need to develop new tools to assess health literacy, reflecting health literacy definitions .This will not only produce a comprehensive measure of health literacy, reflecting the state of the art of the field and applicable for social research and in public health practice.