Module 3 Health Improvement Discussion
For Module 3 Health Improvement Discussion, Identify opportunities for improving the health of a population through behavioral change within your experience. Make your case by analyzing major factors that affect the opportunity, such as how processes of change or stages of patient engagement affect initiative opportunities.
For this discussion:
Initial post: 300-350 words
M3 Health Improvement Discussion
Behavior change in public health refers to the efforts one can put in place to change the behavior of a certain population to promote health within the population. Healthy behavior changes can focus on a person’s physical, emotional or social health. Some of the weight problems facing many people in the African American population are because they have not dealt with their emotional health (Hooker et al., 2018). The opportunity I would take to improve health within the population is to educate the public on the importance of eating healthy. I would teach them the importance of investing in exercise and good food. I would also teach them the importance of dealing with their emotions instead of using comfort food to deal with whatever is making them emotionally unstable. Most people avoid dealing with what is stressing them and prefer to eat. This is unhealthy and, in most cases, leads to the person being unhealthy.
A significant barrier to patient engagement is the knowledge gap regarding their health and health condition (Teo et al., 2022). Most people do not understand the effects of leading a sedimentary life and eating unhealthy food. They do not understand the negative impact of the food they put in their bodies and its ability to lead to lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, eventually leading to other conditions such as heart failure. Other factors that could affect the opportunity include the lack of money by the population. Most of the people in low-income populations tend to work many jobs and thus do not have the time for exercise. They also do not make enough money to afford the healthy food they are required to eat to maintain a healthy body. This could lead to them retaining the same behavior where they eat fast food and do not exercise, thus making it hard to improve their eating habits.
Module 3 Health Improvement Discussion: References
Hooker, S., Punjabi, A., Justesen, K., Boyle, L., & Sherman, M. D. (2018). Encouraging health behavior change: eight evidence-based strategies. Family Practice Management, 25(2), 31–36.
Teo, J. L., Zheng, Z., & Bird, S. R. (2022). Identifying the factors affecting ‘patient engagement’ in exercise rehabilitation. BMC Sports Science, Medicine, and Rehabilitation, 14(1), 1–11.
