Health education

ANJANA K R (2018MSW05)
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL WORK
MSW-PG, SEMESTER-IV
CENTRAL UNIVERSITY OF KARNATAKA
MSW 401-PROJECT PLANNING AND
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
HEALTH EDUCATION

CONTENTS
 INTRODUCTION
 OBJECTIVES
 WHAT’S HEALTH EDUCATION ?
 DEFINITION
 AIM
 MODELS
 CONTENTS OF HEALTH EDUCATION
 PRINCIPLES
 PRACTICE
 METHODS

 EFFECTS
 LEVELS
 NEED
 ANALYSIS
 DISCUSSION
 SUGGESTIONS
 CONCLUSION
 REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION
 Health education (H.E) is indispensable in
achieving individual and community health.
 It is an educational process that helps to
impart health knowledge and reinforce to
adopt desired good healthy behavior or
positive health behavior patterns.

 It plays a pivot role among the socio,
cultural, economic and political well
being of any Nation
 H.E is one among many tools or techniques
which a social worker can use while
working in the field of health sector

OBJECTIVES
 To understand the concept- H.E
 To understand the role of Social work -H.E
 To identify various assumptions upon
which health education is based
 To find the research gap of the concept

“ The first
Wealth
is
health ”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

 Systematic social
educational activity
which has plan,
organization and
evaluation
 Understand the health
status and factors that
harm health

 Change the ill life habits,
behaviors and adopts
positive health behavior
 Reduce risky health
behavior to prevent
illness, promote health
and increase the quality of
life
 One of the elements in
health care combination
designed to facilitate
voluntary adaptations of
behavior

DEFINITIONS
1) The World Health Organization
“comprising consciously constructed
opportunities for learning, involving some form
of communication designed to improve health
literacy, including improving knowledge, and
developing life skills which are conducive to
individual and community health.”

2) Simonds (1976)
“Health education as aimed at bringing about
behavioral changes in individuals, groups and
larger populations from behaviors that are
presumed to be detrimental to health,
to behaviors that are conducive to present and
future health”

 To encourage people to adopt and
sustain health promoting life styles
and practices
 To arouse interest, provide new
knowledge, improve skills and
change attitudes in making
rational decisions to solve their
own problems
(WHO in 1969 and Alma-Ata declaration in 1978)

 To stimulate individual,
community self-reliance and
participation
 To achieve health development through
individual and community involvement at every
step from identifying problems to solving them
 To promote the proper use of health services
available to them

(Park’s, Pg-864)
1)Medical model:
 Primarily interested in the
recognition and treatment of
disease(curing)
 It is concerned with disease
(defined by doctor) or opposed
to illness (defined by client)
 Social, cultural, psychological
aspects were thought to be less
or not at all important

2)Motivational model:
 It emphasize
“motivation” as the main
force to translate health
information into the
desired health action
 Process consisting
several stages through
which an individual
pass before adoption
 Internalization

STAGES OF CHANGES IN BEHAVIOR (ADOPTION MODEL)
1 Awareness
• INTEREST
2
Motivation
• EVALUATION
• DECISION-MAKING
3 Action
• ADOPTION/ACCEPTANCE

3)Social intervention model:
 The social environment
also shapes the behavior
of individual and the
community
 People won’t readily
accept if it is not
approved by the
community to which they
belong
 A combination of
different approaches that
covers cultural,
biological, physical,
social environmental
factors

(Gopal, Rukmani. 2011)
 Human biology
 Nutrition
 Hygiene
 Physical Health
 Family health
 Mental health
 Social Health
 Environmental Health

 Safety Health
 Disease prevention and control
 Prevention of accidents
 Use of health services
 Adolescent Health
 Sex Education

1) Credibility
 The degree to which
a content or message
is trustworthy or
factual towards
receiver
 It depends upon the
communicator or
medium of
communication
Ex, Official website of health dept, Asha
Workers SWS

 Psychological
principle
 Felt needs- need
that people feel
about themselves
2) Interest

 Principle of active
learning
 Community
Participation aims at
encouraging people to
create a sense of
involvement, personal
acceptance, collective
responsibility and
decision-making
3)Participation

 Awakening of the fundamental desire to learn
 First step in learning to change where it is
contagious in nature too
 Two types of Motives
4) Motivation
PRIMARY MOTIVES SECONDARY MOTIVES
Driving forces initiating
people into action : inborn
desires
Desires created outside
forces or incentives
EX, Hunger, Sex, Survival Ex, Praise, Love, Rewards

 Start from where the
people are and with what
they understand and then
proceed to new knowledge
 Using the existing
knowledge of the people as
pegs on which to hang new
knowledge
5) Known to unknown

 Communicate in the
language people understand,
and never use words which are
strange and new to the people
 Teaching should be within
the mental capacity of the
audience
6) Comprehension

 Few people can learn all
that is new in a single
period.
 Repetition at interval is
necessary. If the message is
repeated in different ways,
people are more likely to
remember it
 If there is no
reinforcement, the possibility
of individual going back to
the pre-awareness stage is
high
7) Reinforcement

An action-process;
not a memorizing
one in the narrow
sense
8) Learning by doing

 Health educator
should set a good
example in the
things he is
teaching.
9) Setting an example

 Sharing information, ideas
and feelings happen most
easily between people who
have a good relationships
 Building good
relationships with people goes
hand with developing
communication skills
10) Good human relations

 One of the key
concepts of the system
approach
 The health educator
can modify the
elements of system (Ex,
message, channels)
 For effective
communication,
feedback is of
paramount importance
11) Feedback

 Leaders are the
changing agents
and they can be
made use of in
health education
work
12) Leaders

PRACTICE
AUDIO-VISUALAIDS:
1.Auditory Aids: Radio, Tape-recorder,
microphones, amplifiers, earphones
2. Visual aids: chalk board, leaflets, posters,
charts, slides, filmstrips
3. Combined A-V Aids: Television, Sound films,
Slide-tape combination
(Park, k., pg- 871)

METHODS
1. INDIVIDUALAPPROACH
2. GROUPAPPROACH
3. MASS APPROACH
(Park, k., pg- 872)

EFFECTS
 Knowledge: It increase the level of factual
knowledge on health, prevention of diseases
and on the appropriate positive health
behavior among people
 Attitude: Provision of appropriate
knowledge should lead to formation of
positive attitudes towards a person’s own
health and health of other members among
the community

 Behavior: Once positive attitudes are
formed, this will reflect in the
behavior of the recipients
 Habit: The change in behavior of the
recipients will lead to habit
formation
(Glanz, K., Rimer, B.K., & Vishawanath, K. , 2008).

Health education can be applied at all three
levels of disease prevention and can be of
great help in maximizing the gains from
preventive behavior
 Primary prevention level
 Secondary prevention level
 Tertiary prevention level

 H.E encourages a person to make
healthy choices
 It teaches about physical, mental,
emotional and social health
 It motivates people to improve and
maintain their health, prevent disease,
and avoid risky behaviors.

 It improves the health status of individuals,
families, communities, states, and the nation.
 It enhances the quality of life of people.
 By focusing on prevention, H.E reduces the
costs (both financial and human) that
individuals, employers, families, insurance
companies, medical facilities, communities, the
state and the nation would spend on medical
treatment.

 Education systems should place a stronger focus on
providing people with individual skills to improve their
health (Benjamin Loevinsohn, 1991)
 Conducting health education research on developing
countries is difficult since they meager on an average of
0.02 % health expenditure only. (Loevinsohn, Benjamin
(1991))
 The most frequent causes of United States and globally
are chronic diseases, including heart diseases, cancer, lung
diseases and diabetes (Yach, Hawks, Gould &
Hofman,2004)
 Sexually transmitted diseases reach record highs in U.S
(Hopkins, Tanne, Jannice,2018)

 Nearly 10-30 % of young people suffer from health
impacting behaviors and conditions that needs urgent
attention of policy makers. Nutritional disorders, tobacco
use, harmful alcohol use, other substance use, high risk
sexual behaviors, stress, common mental disorders, injuries
specially affect this population(Singh Sunitha,
Gopalakrishna Gururaj, 2014)
 Rural people in India in general and tribal populations in
particular have their own beliefs and practices regarding
health. Rural health problems is attributed also to lack of
health behavior literacy and health consciousness, poor
maternal and child health services and occupational hazards
(Ashok Vikha Patel, K.V. Somasundaram and R.C. Goyal,
Pg-130, 2002)

 The narratives of misinformation are dominated by personal,
negative and opinionated tones, which often induce fear,
anxiety and mistrust in institutions (Bessi et al., 2015;Panatto et
al., 2018;Porat et al., 2018).
 Although sociology and psychology pioneered research to under-
stand rumor (Allport and Postman, 1947;Bartlett,
1932;Kirkpatrick,1932), psychologists are only beginning to study
the implications of the explosion in internet use (Stone and Wang,
2018).The studies on misinformation in health cover a wide
range of disciplines, there is a marked lack of inter- disciplinary
research. for example, allow hypotheses to be generated by social
scientists using rumors theory and tested using quantitative
analysis of social media data

 Urban areas have only 4.48 hospitals, 6.16 dispensaries and 308
beds per one lakh of (urban) population. For the rural areas the
situation is much worse with 0.77 hospitals, 1.37 dispensaries, 3.2
PHCs and just 44 beds per one Lakh of (rural) population
(Duggal, 2002).
 Budgetary allocation on health sector by the Central
Government over the last decade has been stagnant at 1.3 % of
the total Central Budget, that in the states it has declined from 7 %
to 5.5 %( Draft National Health Policy, 2001)
 Public expenditure on health in India is one of the lowest in the
world. Currently, expenditure on health as a share of the
aggregate annual public expenditure on health is 96.9% in UK,
44.1% in USA, 45.4% in Sri Lanka, and 24.9% in China, but for
India it is a meager 17.3% (Draft National Health Policy, 2001)

 Umbrella term or concept
 Whether there is a need of introducing health education as a
goal in policies and program ?
 Allocation of needed funds in health sector and health
education is necessary or not ?
 Lack of Responsibility of people to self and community,
Propagating misinformation knowingly or unknowingly
 There is lack of research studies in India regarding the
intervention studies and quantitative studies on effects,
method, levels, practice of health education
 Supply of human capital as health professionals like Doctors,
Nurses, Social workers etc is demandable

 Mass approach- Community health should
include as an important content
 Framing of appropriate syllabus in curriculum
according to the developmental stages of children
 Legal frame works for misinformation and lack of
responsibility should be strong on the basis of
right to information
 Social work research on health and health
education should be encouraged more

Health education can bring changes in life styles and risk factors of
disease. Health education is one of the cost effective interventions.
A large number of diseases could be prevented with little or no medical
intervention if people were adequately informed about them and if they
were encouraged to take necessary precautions in time.
But education alone is not sufficient to achieve optimum health. The
target population must have access to proven preventive measures or
procedures
 It is a participatory approach from each individual extended to
community

REFERENCES
 Gopal, Rukmani. (2011). Health Education (1, ed.).(D. Charles,
ed.) Delhi : Neelkamal Publications
 Glanz, K., Rimer, B.K., & Vishawanath, K. (2008). Health
Behavior and Health Education (4, ed.). (T.C. Orleans,ed.)
Sanfrancisco : Jossy Boss
 Park, K. (2015). Park's Textbook of Preventive and Social
Medicine (23, ed.). Jabalpur: Bhanot Publishers
 Patil, A.V., Somasundaram, K.V., & Goyal.R.C. (2002) Current
Health Scenario in Rural India. Maharashtra, India: Black Well
Science
 Sunitha, S. & Gururaj,G.(2014). Health Behavior & Problems
among Young People in India: Cause for concern & call for action:
Indian Journal of Medical Research

 Wang, Yuxi., M,C, Martin., Aleksandra, Kee., & Torbicav (2019)
Systematic Literature Review on the Spread of Health-related
Misinformation on Social Media : Social Science and Medicine.
 Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India; “Draft
National Health Policy, 2001”.
 Duggal, Ravi (2002); “Right to Helath” (Mimeo), CEHAT, Mumbai
 Loevinsohn, Benjamin., (1991) Health Education Interventions in
Developing Countries: A Methodological Review of Published
Articles : International Journal of Epidemiology
 Gerrit, Stassen., Christopher, Grieben., Odile., Sauzet, Ingo,
Froböse., Andrea,Schaller., (2020) Health literacy promotion among
young adults: a web-based intervention in German vocational schools
: Health Education Research.

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