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HEALTH PROMOTION VS HEALTHY BEHAVIOUR


It has long been recognised that medical actions on their own are not
sufficient to restore the health of entire communities. In order to achieve
this, individual and community actions - facilitated by a process of
information dissemination and education that leads to behaviour change -
are needed.  

This has become more urgent in the face of tackling the diseases of poverty
– TB, HIV/AIDS, and Malaria in addition to containing the growing incidence
of chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, mental health problems
and accidents. Similarly in order to go to scale with essential interventions
that can reverse the trend in infant and maternal mortality – it would require
more than health centres, drugs and knowledge  to convince individuals to
take appropriate action within the context of their families and communities.

Within this framework health promotion has come to represent mutual
recognition by community people and programme people – of resources to
tap and barriers to overcome in order to improve health. However, health
promotion has come to mean many things to different people.

For the purpose of this article, health promotion will be defined as
encompassing three interrelated activities – health prevention (adopting
healthy lifestyles e.g. smoking cessation); health protection (immunisation
against deadly diseases); and health education (engaging people in
consideration of healthy behaviuor and associated knowledge) – geared
towards maintaining the health and well being of communities. Therefore
health promotion should not be seen as a set of separate activities other
than being integral part of specific disease interventions.

But it has been shown that the presence of these initiatives – commodities,
health facilities and knowledge - are not sufficient on their own to convince
individuals, within the context of their families and communities to adopt
and maintain health behaviour. In the case of control of HIV/AIDS, TB and
malaria the issue is more of a political and communications challenge than a
scientific and medical one.

It has been noted that a key resource in pursing behaviour gaols in national
disease prevention programmes is good, old-fashioned “political will”.
Similarly, private-sector consumer communication resource needs to be
better tapped for health programmes since the ability to plan and use
communication effectively for behavioural impact in development
programmes calls for a special expertise that is not readily available in the
public sector. Finally experience has shown that efforts to influence political
behaviuor work synergistically with efforts to influence personal health
behaviour.
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