Health Education, Promotion and Prevention for Better Health

Health Education, Promotion and Prevention

To educate is to give someone the knowledge, resources, and instructions needed to achieve their development.

Education for Health: Purpose and Scope

The education for health aims to change knowledge, attitudes, and health behaviors of individuals, groups, and communities so they acquire the habits and attitudes necessary to protect and promote their own health and the environment.

It is important for people to adopt healthy habits to prevent illness or to cope with it.

Key Concepts

• Habit: a behavior that, once learned, is consistently performed even if external circumstances change.
• Routine: a behavior that may change if external circumstances change.
• Prevention: actions aimed at enabling people to control their own means, to prevent or reduce risk factors, stop disease progression, or counteract its effects.

Levels of Prevention

• Primary prevention: health actions that aim to prevent disease onset by acting on causes.
• Secondary prevention: actions performed when disease is in early stages, focusing on early detection and treatment of illness (first symptoms).
• Tertiary prevention: actions to treat disease and prevent chronicity and sequelae.

Protection of health includes actions aimed at controlling health risks.

Promotion includes all actions aimed at encouraging people to voluntarily adopt healthy lifestyles. Unlike prevention, which aims to prevent disease, promotion seeks to improve and increase overall health levels. Promotion includes prevention but has a much broader scope.

Actors and Participation

Promotion involves health professionals as well as volunteers, the educational sector, associations, media, sociologists, and others. Promotion acts on the whole population in their daily lives, not only on specific at-risk groups, and seeks to promote effective participation by the population.

Settings and Agents

• Family: the primary agent of socialization and lifelong accompaniment; the family's participation is very important for building and maintaining healthy habits.
• School: a highly effective setting because children are receptive, have not yet acquired many bad habits, and school attendance reaches most children.
• Workplace: in the workplace people are exposed to various risks that may affect health, including risk of physical injury from accidents and health risks from unhealthy levels of toxic substances.
• Community: promote healthy lifestyles and eradicate unhealthy habits through primary care centers, pharmacies, hospitals, civic groups, parent associations, and similar organizations.