4: Lay beliefs, health promotion Flashcards
What can lay beliefs impact on?
- Health behaviour
- Illness behaviour
- Adherence
What are 3 broad groups to classify extent of adherence?
- Deniers and distancers e- don’t take drugs, or accept they have the diseas
- Acceptors
- Pragmatists - only take medication when symptomatic
What are lay beliefs?
Constructed by people to understand areas of their life about which they have little specialist knowledge.
Social embedded, complex.
May cause rejection of medical information if it is incompatible with competing ideas for which it is considered they have good evidence.
Not entirely independent from professional concepts
What is lay epidemiology?
- An understanding of how and why illness happens
- Based on personal, familial and social knowledge sources
- Candidancy - why it happens to a particular person at a particular time
- System is FALLIBLE
- People take away their individual responsibility - implications for health promotion
What are 3 broad definitions of health?
- Negative
- Positive
- Functional
What is the negative definition of health?
- Absence of illness
- Lower SE groups
- Short term view
What is the positive definition of health?
- A state of wellbeing and fitness
- Higher SE groups
- Health is a long term investment - benefits of health behaviours more evident
What is the functional definition of health?
- The ability to do certain things
- Lower SE groups and older people
What is a health behaviour?
Activity taken to maintain health and prevent illness
What is a sick role behaviour?
Formal response to symptoms, seeking professional help, acting as a patient
What is illness behaviour?
Activity of a person to define illness and seek solution.
Influenced by various factors - culture, saliency of symptoms, tolerance threshold, understanding, lay referral etc
Powerful social sanctioning of hypochondriac behaviour
What is the illness/symptom iceberg?
Most symptoms never present to a doctor, therefore the number of cases identified is far outnumbered by that not identified
What is lay referral?
The chain of advice seeking contacts and ill person makes with other lay people before/instead of seeking help from a HCP
What themes influence seeking advice?
Symptom experience
Symptom evaluation
Knowledge of disease and treatment
Experience and attitudes to HCPs
What are the main global social causes of ill health?
- Poverty
- Social exclusion
- Poor housing
- Poor health systems
Why is it inappropriate to
- Blame people for poor health?
- Credit people for good health?
Context of people’s lives determines their health
Unlikely to be able to directly control many aspects of their life
Adversity = lack of choice
What are the 3 types of prevention?
Primary
Secondary
Tertiary
What is primary prevention?
What are the 4 main approaches?
Prevent the onset of injury or disease
- Immunisation
- Prevent exposure to environmental risk factor e.g. smoking cessation
- Precautions RE communicable disease
- Reducing risk factors- health related behaviours
What is secondary prevention?
Aims to detect and treat a disease/risk factor at an early stage
Prevent progression
Screening, BP monitoring
What is tertiary prevention?
Minimise the effects of an established disease
Maximise remaining capability and functions of an already disabled patient.
What is health promotion?
The process of enabling people to increase control over and improve their health.
What are the principles of health promotion?
- Empowering - over determinants of health
- Participatory
- Holistic
- Intersectoral
- Equitable
- Sustainable
- Multi-strategy
What is the difference between health promotion and public health?
- Health promotion places more emphasis on a means to an end
- Public health focuses more on the end product
What are strategies of health promotion?
- Medical or preventive –> early detection, stop poor behaviour
- Behaviour change –> health psych theories, persuasive, eduction
- Empowerment
- Social change - laws
