Health education assignment

Health education assignment

Personal and Community Health Midterm Exam Review

I. Definitions

Health Communicable disease

Healthy people initiative Community organizing

Epidemiology Gatekeepers

Life expectancy Noncommunicable disease

Pilot test Community health

School Health Advisory Council

II. Identifies

Factors that affect health Types of disease

Types of studies Criteria for causation

Levels of prevention with examples Evaluation Types

Organization categories with examples Modes of transmission

Steps for creating local health-related policies

Incidence vs. prevalence

III. Essay 

Choose a health topic and create an intervention to addresses that issue. In your short essay you should identify the health issue, the target audience, describe the intervention, and any expected outcomes.

The purpose and approach of health education in the United States has evolved over time. From the late nineteenth to the mid-

twentieth century, the aim of public health was controlling the harm from infectious diseases, which were largely under control by the 1950s. The major recent trend regarding changing definitions of school health education is the increasing acknowledgement that school education influences adult behavior.

In the 1970s, health education was viewed in the U.S. mostly as a means of communicating healthy medical practices to those who should be practicing them.[6] By this time it was clear that reducing illness, death, and rising health care costs could best be achieved through a focus on health promotion and disease prevention. At the heart of the new approach was the role of a health educator.[7]

In the 1980s definitions began to incorporate the belief that education is a means of empowerment for the individual, allowing them to make educated health decisions. Health education in the U.S. became “the process of assisting individuals… to make informed decisions about matters affecting their personal health and the health of others.”[8] This definition emerged in the same year as the first national-scale investigation of health education in schools in the United States, which eventually led to a much more aggressive approach to educating young people on matters of health. In the late 1990s the World Health Organization launched a Global Health Initiative which aimed at developing “health-promoting schools”, which would enhance school health programs at all levels including: local, regional, national, and global level.[9]

Today school health education is seen in the U.S. as a “comprehensive health curricula”, combining community, schools, and patient care practice, in which “Health education covers the continuum from disease prevention and promotion of optimal health to the detection of illness to treatment, rehabilitation, and long-term care.”[10] This concept is recently prescribed in current scientific literature as ‘health promotion’, a phrase that is used interchangeably with health education, although health promotion is broader in focus.