Summary

In this Study Session, you have learned that:

• Behaviour is any action that has a specific frequency, duration and purpose whether conscious or unconscious. It is "what we do and how we act". People stay healthy or become ill, often as a result of their action or behaviour.
• There are healthy as well as unhealthy behaviours. Preventive, illness, compliance and utilisation behaviours are best examples of a health behaviour. Feeding additional foods for a child who is under six months, defecating in an open field, doing sexual intercourse without a condom and other similar individual or community activities are examples of unhealthy behaviours.
• There are three main determinants of human health:
  • Human biology (e.g.: age, sex), life styles of an individual (behaviour).
  • The environment (physical/ecological and socio-economic).
  • The availability, accessibility and affordability of the health care organisations.
• In line with this, we have also tried to see that there are modifiable or changeable risk factors (e.g.: cigarette smoking) and non-modifiable or non-changeable risk factors (e.g.: age, sex)
• There are three levels of disease prevention: primary, secondary and tertiary.
  • In the primary level of prevention, health education is designed and given to healthy individuals.
  • In the secondary level of prevention, health education is designed and given to limit the further progression of the disease or health problem.
  • In the tertiary level of prevention, health education is designed and given to those individuals who have a serious illness to prolong their life and to protect them from further complications that may end up with death or disability.
• There are two types of approaches to behaviour change in health education:
  • Persuasive or directive and
  • Informed-decision making approaches.
• There are three models of disease causation and spread:
  • The infection link model. This deals with the chain of disease transmission from one source or host to another source or host.
  • The communicable disease model. This refers to the presence of factors (host, environment and agent) for a communicable disease to occur and spread.
  • The multi-causal diseases model. This explains the onset of a disease caused by more than one factor.
• The first two models apply to the communicable diseases, and the third one is usually applicable to the chronic non-communicable diseases like heart diseases and cancers. This is mainly because such and other similar diseases are not caused by a single factor, rather they need more than one factor or causal agents.
• No matter which model is applied to explain disease causation and spread, health education has a very important role in reducing the spread and transmission of diseases through helping people reducing their health risks.