Synoptic and Analytical Commentary

Purpose and key elements of Health Promotion

The purpose of Health Promotion is engaging and empowering the common individuals and social communities to take healthy behaviours and make changes in their lifestyle which is effective to help them reduce the risk of development of any disease or health issue (Murdaugh et al., 2019). The key elements of health promotion are health education, prevention of disease, support to empowerment and building confidence in tackling disease and enhanced capacity building of the community to take health issues (Schillinger et al., 2020).

Summary of Health Promotion

One of the theoretical approaches of health promotion is behaviour change approach in which people are guided to create alteration in their lifestyle and behaviour in their settings to reach enhanced health condition (Samdal et al., 2017). This approach is been used in framing the HIV Prevention in East Sussex which is evident as the campaign focused on distributing condoms for use and provide advice of behaviour change through evidence to the HIV affected people and people who attend their project link to drop in queries to make behaviour change required for HIV prevention (eastsussexsexualhealth, 2018). The advantage of using behaviour change approach in health promotion is that it helps in changing the way people act to lead their life whereas the disadvantage is that it avoids considering the influence of mind in making changes for health promotion (Van Cappellen et al., 2018).

In health promotion, the education approach includes enhancing the knolwdege of the people regarding health issues and make them aware of the impact of their behaviour towards their health (Ghasemi et al., 2019). The approach is adopted by THT in HIV promotion as they are seen to visit school, communities and people in person to inform about the way HIV and sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) spread and the way they are responsible for spreading and getting affected by the health issue (eastsussexsexualhealth, 2018). The advantage of the approach is that it creates enhanced understanding about health issues among people which alerts their attitude and results them in making behaviour change but the disadvantage is that it is time-consuming, require more finances, workforce and enhanced planning for its establishment (Geidne et al., 2019).

The societal change approach involves making change within the society regarding any health issue and not among individual behaviour (Greenberg et al., 2017). In HIV prevention in East Sussex, the societal change approach is taken which is evident as campaigns are organised in schools, colleges and communities to inform issues with HIV, hindrance faced on living with HIV, need for condom use and others to make behaviour change among all (eastsussexsexualhealth, 2018). The advantage of societal change approach is that it helps to create health issue management among wider individuals, but the disadvantage is that it requires enhanced political and financial support along with structural planning for its execution (Liebenberg, 2018).

The three different ways of promoting health are use of mass media, social media and display and exhibitions. The advantage of using mass media for health promotion is that it helps to holistically educate people of all age within short amount of time whereas the limitation is that they are unable to deliver health information and promote health by specifically targeting key people (Nghiem et al., 2018). Thus, in the current campaign, the mass media is not used for promoting HIV prevention among people. The other way used for health promotion is social media which has the merit to allow reaching the target population specifically through the campaign, but the demerit is that it does not ensures confidentiality of the patient due to which many individuals avoid participating in health promotion through the way (Jane et al., 2018). In the current health promotion, face-to-face communication to promote health information regarding HIV is determined to be stablished through use of social media (eastsussexsexualhealth, 2018). The advantage of using display and exhibition for promoting health is that it helps to easily influence people in understanding information of behaviour change, but the demerit is that it is unable to specifically help people in person-centred manner to cope with health issues and promote their health (Chung, 2017).

Health education and communication

In support of the selected HIV prevention campaign, the three different education methods that can be used are PowerPoint presentation (PPT), drop-in sessions and health talk. The PPT is to be used in the campaign by presenting images and information regarding health issue while directly interacting with the target group in the campaign. This is because the advantage of using PPT is it would ease the way of delivering health information for health promotion, but the demerit is that it does not allow ability to present the topic fully due to its limited time of delivery (Lein et al., 2017). In this purpose, the drop-in session is to be created where direct interaction with focused disease in the campaign is to be communicated in detail to the patients and their specific needs are to be resolved. The merit of using drop-in session is that face-to-face interaction with HIV affected people can be made to promote their health by specifically educating them by understating their level of knowledge but the demerit is that it violates confidentiality of patients (Cramer et al., 2017).

The health talk is to be used in the campaign by creating active engagement of the common people and experts in the campaign. The advantage of using health talk in health promotion is that it allows to reach large people for promoting their health, but the demerit is that it requires increased amount of time to be delivered (Huang et al., 2018). The mentioned campaign regarding HIV is targeted to deliver information to people not affected or affected by HIV of all ages included gay men and women as well as heterosexual individuals. The two key communication resources used in health promotion are leaflet and television advertisement. The merits of using leaflets in health promotion is that they are cost-effective, visually pleasing and less time-consuming mode for promoting health whereas the merits of TV advert are that it helps to reach wide number of people, deliver increased health information within limited time and ensure greater expansion of the health campaign (Berry et al., 2018).

Conclusion

In conclusion, health education is the process of combination of learning experiences which are designed for helping individual and communities for improving their health by enhancing their knolwdege or attitude. It is related to health promotion as without effective health education the individuals cannot understand the need for making change in their behaviour and thoughts that are basis for promoting health.

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References

Berry, E., Aucott, L. and Poobalan, A., 2018. Are young adults appreciating the health promotion messages on diet and exercise?. Journal of Public Health, 26(6), pp.687-696.

Chung, J.E., 2017. Retweeting in health promotion: Analysis of tweets about Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Computers in Human Behavior, 74, pp.112-119.

Cramer, R.L., McLachlan, H.L., Shafiei, T., Amir, L.H., Cullinane, M., Small, R. and Forster, D.A., 2017. Implementation and evaluation of community-based drop-in centres for breastfeeding support in Victoria, Australia. International breastfeeding journal, 12(1), pp.1-14.

eastsussexsexualhealth 2018, HIV Prevention in East Sussex, Available at: https://www.eastsussexsexualhealth.co.uk/documents/ESSHEND-Sexual-Health-Improvement.pdf [Accessed on: 13 March 2021]

Geidne, S., Kokko, S., Lane, A., Ooms, L., Vuillemin, A., Seghers, J., Koski, P., Kudlacek, M., Johnson, S. and Van Hoye, A., 2019. Health promotion interventions in sports clubs: Can we talk about a setting-based approach? A systematic mapping review. Health Education & Behavior, 46(4), pp.592-601.

Ghasemi, V., Simbar, M., Rashidi Fakari, F., Saei Ghare Naz, M. and Kiani, Z., 2019. The effect of peer education on health promotion of Iranian adolescents: A systematic review. International Journal of Pediatrics, 7(3), pp.9139-9157.

Greenberg, M.T., Domitrovich, C.E., Weissberg, R.P. and Durlak, J.A., 2017. Social and emotional learning as a public health approach to education. The future of children, pp.13-32.

Huang, C.Y., Yang, M.C., Huang, C.Y., Chen, Y.J., Wu, M.L. and Chen, K.W., 2018, December. A Chatbot-supported smart wireless interactive healthcare system for weight control and health promotion. In 2018 IEEE international conference on industrial engineering and engineering management (IEEM) (pp. 1791-1795). IEEE.

Jane, M., Hagger, M., Foster, J., Ho, S. and Pal, S., 2018. Social media for health promotion and weight management: a critical debate. BMC public health, 18(1), pp.1-7.

Lein Jr, D.H., Clark, D., Graham, C., Perez, P. and Morris, D., 2017. A model to integrate health promotion and wellness in physical therapist practice: development and validation. Physical therapy, 97(12), pp.1169-1181.

Liebenberg, L., 2018. Thinking critically about photovoice: Achieving empowerment and social change. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 17(1), p.1609406918757631.

Murdaugh, C.L., Parsons, M.A. and Pender, N.J., 2019. Health promotion in nursing practice. New York, NY: Pearson.

Nghiem, N., Cleghorn, C.L., Leung, W., Nair, N., van der Deen, F.S., Blakely, T. and Wilson, N., 2018. A national quitline service and its promotion in the mass media: modelling the health gain, health equity and cost–utility. Tobacco control, 27(4), pp.434-441.

Samdal, G.B., Eide, G.E., Barth, T., Williams, G. and Meland, E., 2017. Effective behaviour change techniques for physical activity and healthy eating in overweight and obese adults; systematic review and meta-regression analyses. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 14(1), pp.1-14.

Schillinger, D., Chittamuru, D. and Ramírez, A.S., 2020. From “infodemics” to health promotion: A novel framework for the role of social media in public health. American journal of public health, 110(9), pp.1393-1396.

Van Cappellen, P., Rice, E.L., Catalino, L.I. and Fredrickson, B.L., 2018. Positive affective processes underlie positive health behaviour change. Psychology & health, 33(1), pp.77-97.