One of the most effective strategies for implementing operative health promotion and programs that are geared towards preventing diseases is health education. With health education, students can learn about health topics. The strategies used in health education are typically tailored for the population that the health education programs are targeted.
Fundamentally, health education enables educators and other key stakeholders in the education system, such as parents, to deliver crucial information on various health topics to learners and other target audiences. Health education entails a lot. Some of the crucial facets of this form of education include the benefits of being healthy, the threats that one faces if they fail to take care of their health or how health education provides individuals with crucial tools for building capacity or supporting behavioral change.
For instance, if learners, particularly those in institutions of higher learning, understood the benefits of taking care of their mental health, there would be far much fewer cases of depression or even depression-induced suicides. Health education topics such as mental health are crucial for students who have to deal with a lot of stress either from schoolwork or life in general.
It is not uncommon to find students dealing with depression due to the stress brought about by having to handle lots of assignments. As a result of this stress, the vast majority of these students choose to look for the help of a professional essay writer.
Some of the education undertakings that are done to promote health education are:
- Workshops
- Lecture sessions
- Online Webinars
- Educational courses
- Classes
The Characteristics of the Approaches Used in Advancing Health Education
Below are traits that characterize the strategies that are used to promote education in health wellness:
- Actively engaging the target population and allowing them to participate.
- Undertaking assessment of the needs of the communities to determine their needs and priorities.
- Education activities that are well-planned and organized to increase the participants’ competencies and awareness in the communities.
- Presentations via audiovisual forms such as through books, videos, or photography.
- Warranting the program’s staff proficiency by preparing them to maintain the program’s utmost fidelity.
The Importance of Promoting Health Education
Health education targeted at communities views the community’s health as a whole. It seeks to identify the health-related issues and the existent health trends within a particular community and work collaboratively with the concerned stakeholders to solve these issues.
The significance of community education stretches over numerous facets within any given community. Some of the benefits that are realized through the promotion of community health education include:
- Creation of massive disease awareness and prevention
- Reduction of infant and maternal health
- Raising awareness on the negative impacts of drug and substance abuse
- Avoidance of unnecessary violence and injuries
- Improvement of behavioral and mental health
- Stoppage of obesity through proper exercising and nutrition
Health education stakeholders in communities work with institutions of learning, governmental bodies, non-governmental agencies to design and implement effective programs of education and collect requisite resources for addressing the specific needs of each community.
Besides providing requisite educational resources and effective programming to communities, stakeholders in the public education programs also work towards ensuring that the entire population has easy access to quality services of healthcare, and other wellness resources.
Research shows that among the commonly experience disparities in regards to health and wellness in the United States of America are:
- Ethnic or racially motivated health disparities
- Disparities due to socioeconomic differences
- Gender-based health discrepancies
The health education’s significance also extends beyond fundamental benefits such as raising awareness of the development of policies and legislations. From local to national level legislation and policy development, health education is crucial in informing and impacting the process of making critical decisions that hold considerable significance to the general community’s health.
This goes for all campaigns and legislation endeavors such as the use of seat belts to the prevention of smoking to the programs designed and implemented to raise or boost awareness in the prevention of health conditions such as diabetes. Workers in the health programs work towards researching and guiding in the process of development of policies and legislations.
Promoting health education in a community might also boost the economy of the community. The boosting of the community’s economy is possible through the reduction in the expenditure towards healthcare and the productivity that is lost as a result of illnesses that could be prevented through health awareness programs.
As more communities strive to improve their health education efforts and programs, the health education field continues to grow too. It is accurate to state that increasingly more communities are currently experiencing growth and many benefits due to their initiatives of improving health education.
