Education and health promotion as prevention
Introduction.
The concept of health has evolved over time, and has gone from a negative vision of health to a positive health based as a way and lifestyle. In this context, a health education sets objectives related to prevention and promotion for the adoption of healthy lifestyle.
Current concept of health education
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health education as “the educational process aimed at providing people with the community of the ability to increase their control over the factors that have influence on their health”. It is understood then that the objective is that people have their scope information to know how to take care of their health, but also get them to behave in a healthy way.
Health is closely related to the environment, lifestyles, health care, human biology and with the socioeconomic and cultural context of a concrete country or region. All these are factors must be considered in the organization of a health education that must influence, reinforce or expand, the aspects that they consider priority in order to instill healthy habits in daily life.
Developing.
So, educating health implies considering a preventive and corrective function that the knowledge necessary for the prevention of certain diseases requires by the person, their family and other social groups. With which, the main purpose of this education is not to avoid disease, but to promote healthy lifestyles.
Health Education: Prevention and promotion of healthy habits
Health education in order to improve people’s health, considers two fundamental dimensions: health prevention and promotion.
Health prevention
Prevention is aimed at avoiding health problems through control of risk situations. In this sense there are different levels of prevention:
Primary prevention: aimed at the general population and organized through activities such as information campaigns. Anitabaco campaigns, related to vaccination, cancer prevention, hygiene, sex education, environmental risk elimination and control, overweight food and control, physical and mental activity, and rest, and rest.
Secondary prevention: seeks to discover the problem as soon as possible. That is, it tries to detect the disease in early stages and thus establish the necessary measures to prevent its progression. Early detection activities and early treatment are developed.
Tertiary prevention: This focuses on therapy and rehabilitation, and also on social reintegration.
Health promotion
Health promotion is aimed at training the population to adopt healthy ways of life. Its objective is to help people so that they can have greater control through participation and management, their own health.
Health promotion covers a wide range of social and environmental interventions aimed at benefiting and protecting the health and quality of life of individuals. It focuses on the prevention and solution of the main causes of health problems, and not only on treatment and healing.
According to WHO (World Health Organization), health promotion has three essential components.
- The formulation of government policies that make health a central aspect.
- A health education so that people can acquire knowledge, skills that allow them to choose healthy options.
- Healthy urban planning by putting preventive measures in primary care communities and centers, to get healthy cities.
Conclusions.
Health is an individual and social responsibility, and the active participation of all institutions and their agents is essential. In the same family environment, a health education must be promoted that responsible for individuals responsible for care for their own health. Subsequently, it is the educational system as a subsequent formal context of socialization who must continue and strengthen that task.
In addition, there are other unregulated training contexts, such as organizations or associations, who are also added with very positive training actions in favor of the health and well -being of people.
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