Public Health in Practice

  • 17 Pages
  • Published On: 20-12-2023
Introduction

Over the past decade, food agriculture and distribution has changed tremendously. The transformation of the food and farming system profoundly affects the sustainability of the world and its people. Increased antibiotic resistance to bacteria, contaminated air and water, and food-borne pathogens already has major impacts. Rural and agricultural populations collapse, and both obesity and malnutrition are in the midst of epidemics. In addition, the more energizing industrialized agricultural model contributes significantly to climate change by speeding up feedback loops with adverse effects on food production, human health, and ecosystem resilience.

Human behavior plays a key role in health maintenance and disease prevention. Health workers have turned to behavioral model changes to help create interventions that promote self-protecting, minimize habits that increase the health risk, and encourage successful accommodation and management in the face of illness to reduce the significant morbidity and mortality associated with health behavior. Several decades of intensive work to improve wellness and lower risk due to behavioral changes have led to successes, setbacks, and learned lessons. Therefore this paper is aimed at researching and analyzing three key issues concerning health:

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Analyze examples of Health Protection practice with an emphasis on perceptions of health, people, and data

Critically evaluate Individual Change approaches; consider their effectiveness, especially concerning ethics.

Critically appraise the extent to which Public Health policy and practice support the Community Development approach.

More and more research shows that successful programs to alter the actions of individuals include multiple approaches to helping people adapt, modify and sustain their behavior. For example, when interventions are adopted to replace one trend with another in the same population to create healthier eating patterns for children and teens, they could not change maladapted eating behavior (Papageorgiou et al., 2018). Similarly, it might take different strategies to sustain a particular behavior over time than first to establish that (Kebede et al., 2020). Models of behavioral change to direct strategies for safe conduct have been created and to encourage successful adaptation and treatment for the disease. Various models are examined here for individual changes in behavior. According to public health practice, different philosophies exist in the pieces of literature about medical ethics.

Ethics Base for Health Promotion Regarding Body Weight

As evidence suggests, ethics raises problems for bodyweight population intervention. For a variety of factors, bodyweight is an ethical issue. Arguably, individuals’ identity is closely linked with their physical being. This problem becomes worse when the category "overweight and obesity," in which an index of 26 or 36 bodyweights (CWB) in kilograms separated by meters in height, can be addressed similarly, is constructed as a single category "at risk." Food is a symbolic and socially essential part of human life, which allows intervention in community, society, and relationships to improve people's food habits (Honarvar et al., 2020). Physical activity has diverse ramifications, with implications for fitness treatments, for various cultural and socioeconomic classes.

Specifying Ethically Relevant Concepts

Conceptual vagueness is a key issue in the ethics of health promotion. Via the charters, health promotion practitioners have an undoubted commitment to these values. They aspire to translate them into good practices, such as justice, health equality, enabling and empowerment, and health promotion. However, several scholars have observed that the charters are abstract and that they do not describe concepts like justice in depth. Therefore progress will need to be made in this field based on thorough engagement with theory and health promotion activities. The definition of conceptually applicable, including the dimensions in which these concepts may differ. It explain how this could be done using a case study of social campaigns by defining two principles, manipulation and stigmatization.

Coercion

The type of forcible restraint can be loosely defined as coercion. Coercion is not included in charters on health promotion; however, it is a fundamental concern in public health ethics to define excessive coercion. This literature is important to reflect on the ethics of health promotion. It would undoubtedly involve some form of coercion and interference with human freedom and autonomy to achieve the objectives of population health. The rules sometimes referred to as structural measures (e.g., smoke-free law, arms prohibition, or alcohol levies), are oppressive. These restrictions may be common and lead to health benefits and impose pressure on targeted people (Park et al., 2020).

Consider coercion in connection with campaigns on social marketing. Social marketing is a fraction of health promotion, but its intensity of resources and scope make it examined. Social marketing is also framed as a non-coercive, information-oriented intervention. Social media efforts can be aimed at informing customers to choose informedly to convince them to comply. Additionally, coercion could vary from 'rational' to 'unreasonable.' The literature on ethics indicates that excessive coercive practice can involve teaching people to negative perceptions and/or to fear new and previously unidentified risks, especially if there is a low risk of renal disease and no obvious symptoms, and that the anticipated effects on health outcomes are never experienced.

This campaign meets several unfair intimidation requirements. It is involved in the pursuit of parental guilt and is meant to teach any viewer who is over 25 to have a bad impression of himself and picture his or her circumference leading to cancer, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. It stresses that small increases in waist measurement increase risk and create self-monitoring for people at low risk of healthy weight and low risk of present and future diseases. These issues are mostly due to population-level risk data to produce advertisements that target individuals and concentrate on the single bodyweight risk factor (Liu et al., 2017).

Stigmatization.

Stigmatization is another central principle for the advancement of health ethics and, as such, is a possibility for the promotion of iatrogenesis. The sociological literature can define this definition on stigma. Social unacceptableness is what stigma is all about: a "spoiled name." 71 Stigma binds people to negative stereotypes, and stigma can lead to harm and discrimination. People communicate differently with stigmatized individuals, which can further weaken the sense of self of a stigmatized person. Unless a stigmatic individual is able to escape the 'false identification' alleged to him—a daunting task in the middle of numerous activist movements—only "passing as natural" and modifying people with whom one communicates can be prevented (Geldsetzer, 2020).

These perspectives suggest elements of the idea of the stigma that is ethically charged. Human features can vary from non-stigmatization to high stigmatization. The features of stigmatization are probably more noticeable — preventing "natural moving" — and generating reactions that indicate the feature is not "normal" (e.g., eliciting staring, pointing, talking, or embarrassed looks). For example, a person with a congenital disorder can be stipulated but freely handled, whereas a person with a facial scar from street combat may be stigmatized and afraid. The person may be considered more or less responsible for the characteristic. An intervention may enhance stigmatization by drawing attention to a trait and encouraging people to react to it differently. This mechanism can be colored by attributions of liability (Geldsetzer, 2020).

Critically evaluate Individual Change approaches; consider their effectiveness, especially concerning ethics.

In groups, neighborhoods, and cultures, there have several methods for promoting health. It is possible to legislate, for instance, ban certain products, use fiscal means to alter the actions of people (i.e., raise or lower taxes on certain items); it is possible to use persuasion methods (e.g., warn or influence people, for instance, through social marketing (Geldsetzer, 2020). In attempt to get people into such behaviors, induce them or "guiding" people into them, It could collaborate in them and enable people (Geldsetzer, 2020) to improve the atmosphere (e.g., add speed bumps so that the car's speed is reduced and the risk of accidents reduced). In general, these actions consist of top-down policies where government, government department, county council, and municipality attempt to adjust certain factors to minimize the risk of disease and injury or increase the risk of population health raising or maintaining it.

All tactics, however, are not top-down. Some of them are 'local,' which means that professionals meet people from scratch. In general, these programs are directed to disadvantaged persons, groups, or populations. In general, the people and groups that could need assistance to fall into two categories overlapping. They may have issues with living conditions, such as poverty, marginalization, inadequate housing, and unemployment, which placed them at risk of disease or disease. Or they have a "risk" or a "lifestyle" issue like smoking, alcohol consumption, substance use, sexual harm, overweight, or obesity. Research indicates that if one is a disadvantaged group, there are more lifestyle issues than others (Ruggiano & Perry, 2019). Most of the alcohol problems are more prevalent among vulnerable and lower socioeconomic groups except in the case of alcohol (Ruggiano & Perry, 2019).

Few community interventions improve or maintain population health directly (Ruggiano & Perry, 2019; Tengland, 2010). 1 Most are indirect or instrumental in improving the health of (future) individuals through some other change or action, e.g., in making an awareness campaign eat more fruit and vegetables, which leads to better overall health, or in building a new bike lane which allows cycling people work to improve their overall fitness. Some of these indirect strategies are linked, as examples show, to internal changes (individuals) and some external changes (environmental ones).

Two approaches, namely behavioral change and empowerment, are among the general policies that deal with such problems. Both approaches serve to improve the health of people. An important distinction is that the empowerment strategy can be used only for 'local' interventions as it includes cooperation with the participating people. In contrast, behavioral improvement methods can be used for both top-down and local interventions. Despite the overall goal, they both have a particular approach or "resources," that is, sustained or enhanced fitness. These approaches and instruments can partially overlap but seem to clash as well (Ruggiano & Perry, 2019).

Behavior Change

In short, people working on behavioral change try to persuade other people to change health-related behavior. It means not smoking, eating less, doing more exercise, drinking less alcohol, drinking condoms, abstaining from unprotected sex, driving carefully, taking motorcycle helmets, or stopping drugs. Often this means that people want to change their "lifestyles" The main objective of research initiatives, according to Hennink et al. (2019), was to 'find and test the most successful approaches to promote a shift in health behavior. In 1976, Simonds described education in health as the practice of 'bringing behavioral change into behaviors which promote health in individuals, groups and larger populations' (Williams et al., 2020). To achieve behavioral changes and decreased resistance to changing, there is also the striving for 'successful strategies' (Ruggiano & Perry, 2019) and 'developing approaches' (Ruggiano & Perry, 2019), with 'powerful results' (Hennink et al. (2019).

Many of these methods also use some kinds of social psychological theory, including, for example, the health belief model, the rational theory of action, or social cognitive theory, to accomplish their goals (Hennink et al., 2019). Other theories used include the models of trans-theoretical (stages of transition), diffusion of the theory of creativity, and communication/comportement change (Degenhardt et al., 2017). These theories and models serve as methods to target those types of behavior. They thus help to influence and change the actions of people's groups in health. Several writers and theoreticians stress their usefulness in practice. Theories will enable understanding the methods that can be used and clarification on 'the most efficient way of making change. According to Bandura's theory, the ultimate test is 'whether the methods that indicate are 'capable of changing the human impact, thinking and action.

Empowerment

Empowerment is about allowing the people, group, or society to monitor the changes they take part as much as possible (Archibald et al., 2019). Therefore, they should actively formulating the issue, resolving the challenges, and taking steps to address them. The specialist can mainly be a facilitator or an enabler. Apart from the approach to behavior changes that rely mainly on cognitive or behavioral psychology, the approach to empowerment is focused on humanistic-existentialist thinking on human existence. The difference is that the empowerment approach highlights how people can transform and progress in a positive direction (internal).

Digital behavioral change

The study showed that in comparison with other reviews, two main classes of behavioral changes were identified. The first one was input and tracking, the method used in the study most widely compared with 25% for sedentary behavior and 13% for gamified fitness apps, which represented the most commonly used behavioral change strategy. As Attell et al. (2017) pointed out, a broad range of studies has shown that feedback and monitoring are successful approaches to behavior changes. A direct connection to a theoretical basis can be established in control theory. The theory of controls also indicates that the setting of goals and feedback and tracking are successful in changing behavior (Barnes, 2018). It is also worth noting that of all coded BCTs, the target and preparation group has been coded just four times (1%) compared with 28% in the sedentary comportement study (Attell et al. (2017) and 10% in the Gamified Health Apps study. This could suggest that targets and preparations are a high-potential theoretical procedure to change healthy eating habits within the field of digital behavior change measures.

Critically appraise the extent to which Public Health policy and practice support the Community Development approach.

Recently, international declarations have reaffirmed the position of civil society in enhancing people's wellbeing and combating health inequalities across global traditions of involvement and empowerment (World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe, 2012; World Health Organization, 2016). Aspirational statements must be converted into concrete, successful programs involving and strengthening communities, whether they are geographical or related to common interests, which are a constant challenge for health planners and practitioners (Barnes, 2018). Community participation is a multi-dimensional and somewhat nebulous term covering a broad range of approaches, objectives, and actions, which indicate that citizens play an active role in shaping health and creating conditions for good health (McLemore et al., 2018). Processing and background attention is important, and thus structured methods are the exception rather than the rule (Wachter, & Mittelstadt, 2019). This creates difficulty for those who wish to synthesize proof of what works or use various group interventions for realistic methods. In addition, despite a rich and methodologically diverse basis of proof, participation approaches have not been recognized to the same degree as more conventional public health preventive programs. The creation, delivery, and assessment of health services are commonly thought to benefit community engagement. However, several obstacles remain for the active and sustainable participation of the population. Importantly, the impact of community engagement on results at the community and person-level has little evidence. Looking at the results of group engagement in countries with large and medium-scale revenues in a systematic study (Islam et al., 2020).

Methods

PRISMA guidelines have been established for this study. Eligible research covered those involved in developing, executing, and assessing health programs, policies, and actions by the government, service users, customers, families, patients, the public, and their representatives. Databases that include Medline, Embase, Global Health, Scopus, and LILAC were searched. Inclusion papers were independently screened, data extraction was carried out, and bias risk analyses were evaluated. There have been no language limitations. Twenty-seven thousand two hundred thirty-two documents, 23,468 after deleted duplicates, have been found. Forty-nine met the inclusion criteria for this study following the titles and abstract screening. The results were summarized in a narrative. Results were classified as process results, group results, health effects, empowerment, and stakeholders' experiences. The analysis shows a wide range, especially when strong organizational and community processes are substantiated, that community participation has a positive influence on health. The idea is that participatory interventions and positive outcomes, like the empowerment of the population and improved health, do not account for linear change but rather of dynamic and multi-faceted processes (Wachter, & Mittelstadt, 2019).

Outcome

Reported results were categorized as process results, group results, health results, stakeholder perspectives, and empowerment. Process results are defined as short-term results which represent the efficacy of collaboration on a long-term basis. Organizational processes deal with collective successes in the communities, while community processes are associated with process-related improvements in the target community (Rossi et al., 2020). Community outcomes are described as intermediate social effects representing changes in community members' awareness, attitudes, and actions. More broadly, the results represent human value, community growth, socio-cultural and environmental improvements. This includes results. Health results show improvements in the health status of community members (Ross et al., 2018). It also explain the results dealing with broader sociopolitical forces and the views of stakeholders. Studies often focus on collective or personal empowerment as a result. Studies that describe empowerment framed it as groups that work together to solve the community's self-identified issue and create meaningful changes that maintain themselves and support the transfer of information between community members. These studies often point to the complex power relationships and systemic inequalities between community members and practitioners or politicians that serve to define and assess community or individual empowerment (Ross et al., 2018).

In the sample alone, the number of results published by category of disease and by design. Twenty-nine studies have recorded process results: 23 reported organizational processes and nine reported group processes; 21 reported community results; 16 reported stakeholder prospects on either process or project outcomes; 6 reported empowerment, and 12 reported health outcomes. The results of the method, particularly of organizational processes, were most frequently recorded in community health studies (n = 12). In contrast, only one study had documented these results, both infectious and category of environmental health. The least identified in each research category was empowerment; of the six studies, four were in the Group Category of Wellbeing. More often than not, the health effects of healthy living (n = 4) and non-communicable disease programs were identified (n = 5).

Outcome results of community involvement

The process included consultation with the stakeholders, and although it was limited in scope, it was important to assess the validity and functional importance of the whole system. Community involvement in this process was not possible even though members of the voluntary sector were of great importance. According to input from politicians, practice, and academia, a family of approaches centered on the group was considered to be true as a typology. The preference of stakeholders for the word 'approaches' was a clear issue, not 'interventions,' as the concept included both working methods and structured interventions (Laverack, 2006; Draper et al., 2010).In reality, systematic strategies to promote wellbeing can also work through more than one class, while the 'family' has clarified various approaches. Therefore, the family is within a collection of literature that recognizes the primacy of the mechanism in understanding the practice of community engagement (Laverack, 2006; Draper et al., 2010).

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Conclusion

This paper focused on collecting and spreading information on community engagement to promote the transition to a more community-oriented system of public health. The implementation of the national guidelines contributed to establishing a system for participatory action mapping, contributing to the formation of national strategies and local practices. Also, the research was able to assess the examples of Health Protection practice with an emphasis on perceptions of health, people and data. The research was able to find out the factors and examples of individual health protection. Finally, the paper managed to evaluate Individual Change approaches; consider their effectiveness, especially concerning ethics.

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