Health Education: Strategies, Methods & Action Fields
Health Education: Key Concepts and Applications
Health Education encompasses any combination of learning experiences designed to help individuals and communities improve their health, by increasing their knowledge or influencing their attitudes.
Key Features of Health Education
- Instrument for Knowledge Acquisition: Helps individuals acquire scientific knowledge on health-related behaviors and problems.
- Communication Tool: Provides information on health issues and empowers people to make informed decisions about their behavior.
- Essential for Healthcare Professionals: Facilitates daily interactions between healthcare providers and users.
- Promotes Self-Esteem: Encourages motivation, personal skills, and improved self-esteem to enhance health.
- Addresses Risk Factors: Focuses on identifying and modifying risk factors and promoting the appropriate use of health services.
- Instrument for Health Promotion: A fundamental tool for promoting overall health and well-being.
Objectives of Health Education
- Integrate health into community values.
- Provide the population with knowledge and skills to solve health problems.
- Encourage participation in and use of health services.
Pedagogical Principles & Influencing Factors
- Lifestyles: Personal experiences, social opportunities, culture, values, and priorities influence individual choices.
- Living Conditions: The environment, access to affordable goods and services, and opportunities for a socially and economically productive life play a crucial role.
Fields of Action
Goals for the Healthy Population
- School: Acquire knowledge, develop healthy habits, and foster responsibility.
- Work Environment: Promote a healthy work environment, including worker protection.
- Community: Identify at-risk groups, inform and motivate individuals, and empower people.
Goals for the Population with Illnesses
- Chronically Ill: Modify habits, promote self-responsibility, and encourage self-care.
Pedagogical Practices in Health Education
Communication: Involves a sender, a message, and a receiver.
- Sender: Should have appropriate training and consider the receiver’s characteristics.
- Message: Should use language familiar to the receiver, be relevant to their interests and needs, and be integrated into their living conditions.
- Receiver: Should be considered in terms of their integrity, individuality, sociability, and autonomy.
Relationship Between Sender and Receiver
- Unidirectional or Bidirectional.
- Direct or Indirect (in terms of time and space).
Bidirectional Direct Methods
- Dialogue/Interview:
- Rules: Maintain a comprehensive attitude, identify needs, respect feelings, maintain professional secrecy, and provide information and resources.
- Prerequisites: Listening, conversing, and advising.
- Group:
- Objectives: Alleviate and overcome isolation, sort through and search for alternatives to personal or family problems, promote learning, social maturation, and autonomy.
Individual Techniques
- Educator: Should demonstrate empathy, warmth, respect, and active listening.
- Interview Format: Includes presentation, identification of problems and difficulties, identification of enablers for change, decision-making by the receiver, and a closing.
Group Techniques
- Topics of interest.
- Free communication.
- Ideal group size: 10-15 people.
- Minimum of two professionals.
- Involvement of the whole group.
- Techniques: Role-playing, puzzle techniques, group discussion, community techniques.
Unidirectional Indirect Methods
- Visual: Posters, brochures, press.
- Auditory: Radio.
- Mixed: Cinema, television.
- Advantages: Greater impact on the cognitive area, useful for informing, raising awareness, reaching a large number of people, and cost-effective.
- Disadvantages: Less effective than direct methods, and may fail to change behaviors.
Intervention Models in Health Education
- Biomedical or Care Model: Focuses on educational treatment, addressing the population seeking care, and is unidirectional.
- Preventive or Critical Model: Emphasizes prevention, lifestyles, involves social workers, targets the community, and is bidirectionally unbalanced.
- Community Model: Promotes self-care, participation, targets the community, and is bidirectionally balanced.
Programming Methodology
Situation analysis, clear and measurable objectives, activities and methodology, resources, coordination, documentation, and evaluation of results.
Intervention Levels in Primary Care
- Consultation appointment (brief and clear messages).
- Scheduled consultation (self-care).
- Nursing consultation (dietary habits).
- Authorized medication (long-term treatments).
- Home care (acute/chronic conditions).
- Special situations (elderly, illiterate individuals, young people, multi-pathological patients).