Within in this essay I will be looking at three different approaches to health education, explaining two models of behaviour change that have been used in recent health education campaigns, and assessing how the social context may influence the ability of health education campaigns to change behaviour in relation to health.
Health promotion involves doing things to prevent disease and to improve individual and community’s health. Health promotion offers solutions to many of the health problems facing society such as obesity, lack of exercise and smoking though developing skills and knowledge, community action, supportive environments, healthy public policy and health services. Health promotion helps individuals or communities to increase control over and improve their health and wellbeing.
The features of health promotion are that it is based on a holistic view of health; it uses participatory approaches it focuses on the determinants and addressing of health not just health problems and conditions. These include the social, behavioural, environmental and economic conditions that are the root cause of poor health, wellbeing and illness such as education, income, employment, working conditions, social status. Health promotion builds on existing strengths and assets and it uses multiple, complementary approaches to promote health for the individual, community and population as a whole.
There are three main approaches to health education. The approaches have been used to as a way to improve the health of individual. The three approaches are, the social marketing approach, roles of mass media and community development approach. There are many different ways of approaching promoting health education such as, planned campaigns and advertising. This has the advantage of targeting a wide target audience and may be tailored to meet specific objectives. In the world we live