Introduction
Health is the first most important form of wealth. Health –the physical, mental, and social health of an entire population- is a nations fundamental natural resource. Health is the essential foundation that supports and natures growth, learning, personal well-being, social fulfillment, enrichment of others, economic production and constructive citizenship. This is why promotion of health and disease prevention are necessary. In this essay one has to discuss the weight issues that affect the cardio health of a person, and how solving of weight issues and interventions will promote health and prevent disease.
They have to research and find the reasons for weight gain and get solutions that prevent disease and promote health. In this essay one will compare two articles, one that touches on issues of community wide campaigns to promote health and prevent disease and the other that bases its facts on the psychiatrics role health promotion. (Matson-Koffman, 2005 & Stockols, 2004).
Main text
Successful health promotion and protection can be made available cost effectively to the entire population by community wide campaigns. Community-wide campaigns are a promising strategy for improving healthy eating and related health outcomes; however, additional evidence is needed to determine what facilitates or hinders the successful implementation of this strategy. One can describe community-wide campaigns as interventions that use multiple intervention strategies within multiple settings in a community. Their multi-sect oral approach distinguishes them from comprehensive nutritional programs that focus on a single setting (Matson-Koffman, 2005).
These campaigns most often include components target individual level behavior change, as well as components that target organizational and community factors that support positive behavior change. Mass media, individual or group education, and policies/environmental changes e.g. point of purchase labeling are common strategies used in community-wide campaigns to increase healthy eating (Matson-Koffman, 2005).
A comprehensive community based nutrition intervention to reduce weight and reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease include community classes, grocery store tours, a supermarket point of purchase program, speakers’ bureaus, home study courses, worksite nutrition programs, and mass media coverage. There can also be a community based medical campaign where health workers dealing with community health advice the community on methods of weight loss and cardiovascular disease prevention by this act (Matson-Koffman, 2005).
There is mixed evidence as to the effectiveness of community-wide campaigns in improving health outcomes. One review of the evidence found that community-wide campaigns to promote healthy eating are effective while two other reviews found the level of effectiveness to be inconsistent and lacking significance. Another review found that it is effective when focusing on a specific segment of the community like those who want to lose weight for their health purposes and not combined with those who want to lose weight for appearance only (Matson-Koffman, 2005).
Despite the rich tapestry of psychological theories and applications, there appears to be a disquieting sense that psychologists’ contribution to promoting health and preventing disease have always fallen short of mark. The initiation and maintenance of dietary patterns and exercise activity that are important for health and cardiovascular disease prevention have proved difficult. The articles integrate current psychological theories into one model, the model is in context of program development, implementation and evaluation (Stockols, 2004).
Social marketing concepts and strategies integrate many contemporary theories and principles for behavior change. Thus, this contribution is seen as a major focus and potential contribution for the frame work offered. Here there is a redirection of health psychology’s time and effort if psychologists are to embrace the goal of helping people reach health promotion, health protection and preventive service objectives to reduce the burden of unnecessary morbidity and premature mortality (Stockols, 2004).
Recommendations to improve on the plans considered in these articles. A new would require health psychologists to do the following; attend more to epidemiological and disease indices in order to understand factors related to health, disease and disability as well as to important rates and changes in these data and also to understand how such data trends are used to develop objectives and goals; direct more programs of intervention and research to help the reach high objectives and goals formulate primary or secondary prevention programs appropriate to scope, timing and levels of interventions to meet realistic goals; target and implement programs through a complement of theories, models and perspectives described that will allow for the complete use of the marketing approach, with particular attention paid for designing programs for specific population segments and with more concerted emphasis on environmental design; and finally use research methods as a means of informing and further developing frameworks, with emphasis on those methods that better target interventions and with such interventions capable of real-world implementation and eventual wide dissemination (Stockols, 2004).
For the community-wide campaigns there should be adequate planning for the sustainability of ones campaign by building partnerships with a variety of stake holders and identifying sufficient resources for on-going maintenance. Intervention components that reach more rather than fewer people, such as policy or environmental changes, may increase impact of this strategy. At the same time, interventions that reach on high risk subsets of larger communities may also be more effective than those that attempt to impact health outcomes of the general population (Matson-Koffman, 2005).
Conclusion
Despite great progress in the past two decades, health promotion interventions are not as effective as they be because the basic and applied science of health promotions is not fully developed. Furthermore, there is not an established mechanism to synthesis the best research findings and translate this knowledge into common practice. The health project is working to address these needs by seeking out, evaluating, promoting and distributing programs with demonstrated effectiveness in influencing personal health habits and the cost-effective use of healthcare services. (Matson-Koffman, 2005 & Stockols, 2004).
References
Matson-Koffman, D.M, et al.(2005). American Journal of Health Promotion, 19(3), 167-193.
Stockols , J.C et al. (2004). Health psychology; a psychosocial perspective. 1284-1290.