health

1. Health related behavioures
Assistant lecturer
Salma J. Shehab
University of Kufa / Faculty of Nursing
Family andCommunity Health Nursing Branch
Health –related behavioures
Assistant lecturer
Salma J. Shehab
University of Kufa / Faculty of Nursing
Family andCommunity Health Nursing
Branch

2.  Health Promotion is that part of health
care that deals with improving
behavior, and it is a set of structured
experiences designed to facilitate the
involuntary adoption of behaviors that
enhance the health of individuals,
groups and society.

3. 1. Health Behaviors – Definitions
and Emerging Concepts
 Health behaviors, sometimes called
health-related behaviors, are actions
taken by individuals that affect health
or mortality. These actions may be
intentional or unintentional, and can
promote or detract from the health of
the actor or others.

4.  Actions that can be classified as
health behaviors are many; examples
include smoking, substance use, diet,
physical activity, sleep, risky sexual
activities, health care seeking
behaviors, and adherence to
prescribed medical treatments.

5.  Health behaviors are frequently
discussed as individual-level
behaviors, but they can be measured
and summarized for individuals,
groups, or populations. Health
behaviors are dynamic, varying over
the lifespan, across cohorts, across
settings, and over time.

6.  Any behaviour that affects a person's
health status, either positively or
negatively, is considered to be a
health-related behaviour. Daily habits
involving diet, exercise, safety
practices and substance use are not
only related to the prevention of
disease, but also affect the
management of chronic illness and
degree of disability.

7.  Among the health-related behaviours
most often encouraged in health
promotion programmes is regular
physical exercise because of its
positive impact on health, disease
prevention, psychological wellbeing
and overall longevity.

8.  Regular physical activity is associated
with lower death rates for adults of any
age, even when only moderate levels
of physical activity are performed.
Regular physical activity decreases
the risk of death from heart disease,
lowers the risk of developing diabetes,
reduces the risk of colon cancer and
helps reduce blood pressure.

9.  Health behaviors shape health and
well-being in individuals and
populations. Drawing on recent
research, we review applications of
the widely applied “social
determinants” approach to health
behaviors. This approach shifts the
lens from individual attribution and
responsibility to societal organization

10.  and the myriad institutions, structures,
inequalities, and ideologies
undergirding health behaviors. Recent
scholarship integrates a social
determinants perspective with
biosocial approaches to health
behavior dynamics.

11.  Empirical advances model feedback
among social, psychological and
biological factors. Health behaviors
are increasingly recognized as
multidimensional and embedded in
health lifestyles, varying over the life
course and across place and reflecting
dialectic between structure and
agency that necessitates situating
individuals in context.

12.  Advances in measuring and modeling
health behaviors promise to enhance
representations of this complexity.

13. 2. A “Social Determinants”
Approach to Health Behaviors
 The interdisciplinary approach labeled
“social determinants” seeks to
understand how the social world
shapes people’s health. One major
pathway is through health behaviors.
Health scholars distinguish between
“downstream” (individual, in the body)
and “upstream” (social structural,
macro-level) causes of health
behaviors.

14.  Examples of the latter include
institutions such as the health care
system – which is changing rapidly.
due to the Affordable Care Act and is a
target of ongoing research – and the
labor market – recession-based
changes in this institution have
spurred recent research on health
implications.

15.  Important concepts related to social
determinants of health, like
discrimination and stress. For instance,
discrimination is encoded in institutional
practices, plays out in interaction at
conscious and unconscious levels
through processes involving bias and
stigma, and affects individuals through
health-damaging self-perceptions and
stereotype threat.

16. Discrimination
 Discrimination exists in all aspects of
life, including in Health and Social
Care. Everywhere we look, we see
differences and these differences can
lead to prejudice; a pre-formed
negative judgement or attitude
towards someone who is different to
ourselves.
 This results in discrimination, which is
defined as the unjust or prejudicial
treatment of different categories of
people.

17.  Discrimination can be based on many different
characteristics, however, it is only unlawful
discrimination under the Equality Act 2010 if you
are treated or treat someone unfairly because of
any one or more of the so-called protected
characteristics.
 These characteristics are:
 Age.
 Disability.
 Gender reassignment.
 Pregnancy and maternity.
 Race.
 Religion or belief.
 Sex.
 Sexual orientation.

18.  This does not mean that
discrimination is not also
happening based on other
categories, such as:
 Socio-economic.
 Education level.
 Nationality (which is different to Race).
 Regional or national accent.
 Appearance.

19. 3. Biosocial Processes: Situating
Individuals in Social and Physical
Contexts
 As conceptual and empirical attention to
social and ecological factors grows, so,
too, do efforts to expand understanding of
biological factors. These advances
intersect in biosocial approaches that
include concepts such as embodiment,
biological embedding, social genomics,
and systems approaches .

20.  Embodiment is the process of the
biological incorporation of societal and
ecological context from the physical
and social worlds in which we live .

21.  Embedding emphasizes the
developmental aspects of embodiment
by focusing on timing of environmental
exposures, with an emphasis on
exposures that occur early in the life
course, perhaps coincidental with critical
periods of brain or biological
development, and with potential to shape
life-long outcomes through a variety
social and biological mechanisms, some
of which span generations .

22.  Life course frames that emphasize
interdisciplinarity, history, time, context,
and linked lives guide much recent
investigation. And notably, through the
conceptual refocus around social
determinants and societal organization, a
growing emphasis on links among health
behaviors is emerging, upending the more
usual single-disease, or single-health
behavior, orientation to research and
research specialization.

23.  Highlights
 Health behaviors reflect interplay
between people and contextual factors.
 “Social determinants” include societal
institutions, ideologies, and inequalities.
 Health behaviors contribute to and reflect
embodiment and other biosocial
processes.
 Recent work engages health lifestyles,
agency, and multilevel life course
dynamics.
 Empirical advances model feedback
among social, psychological and

24.  Self-rated health (SRH) is a commonly
used measure in surveys as a
substitute for a clinical measure of
biomedical status or as a measure of
health-related quality of life, which has
demonstrated validity and reliability in
a variety of populations. SRH is
typically measured on a single-item
asking respondents to choose a
response that best describes their
general health.