Health education is an educational activity and process to help individuals and groups master health care knowledge, establish health concepts and consciously adopt healthy behaviors and lifestyles through information dissemination and behavioral intervention. Its purpose is to eliminate or reduce the risk factors affecting health, prevent diseases, promote health and improve the quality of life.
Its focus is to promote individuals or groups to change bad behaviors and lifestyles.
The change of behavior is based on the change of health concept and belief, so first of all, individuals or groups should master health knowledge, improve their cognitive level and skills, establish the concept of pursuing health, and actively improve their behavior and lifestyle rather than reluctantly.
The practical experience of health education around the world shows that behavior change is a long and complicated process, and many bad behaviors and lifestyles cannot be changed only by personal subjective will. To change behavior, we must rely on supportive health policies, environmental health services and other related factors.
Simple health education theory can't meet the new needs of social progress and healthy development in many aspects. In this case, health promotion began to develop rapidly.
The meaning of health promotion is that the process of promoting people to maintain and improve their health is to coordinate the strategies between human beings and their environment and stipulate the responsibilities of individuals and society for health.
American health educator Lawrence? W.Green pointed out that health promotion refers to all the complexes that can promote behavior and living conditions and support education and environment conducive to health change.
The environment includes socio-political, economic and natural environment, and at the same time supports systems such as mechanism, policy, legislation, finance, organization, society and development.
Health promotion is a comprehensive activity process of mobilizing educational, social, economic and political forces to improve people's health. It includes not only some health education activities aimed at directly improving the knowledge and skills of individuals and groups, but also those activities that directly change social, economic and environmental conditions to reduce their adverse effects on personal and public health.
Health education is the foundation and forerunner of health promotion. On the one hand, health education plays an important role in promoting behavior change. On the other hand, health education plays an important role in stimulating leaders' political will to expand health promotion, promoting people's active participation and promoting health promotion atmosphere.
Therefore, without health education, health promotion will be water without resources and trees without roots.
At the same time, the government's commitments, policies, laws, organizations and other social support conditions and the improvement of the social natural environment strongly support health education. If health education does not promote health, its role will be greatly limited.
Differences and relations between health education and health management
From the connotation and basic operation steps of health education and health management, both of them adopt the management process of baseline data collection, demand assessment, intervention implementation and effect evaluation.
In the pre-planning research and evaluation, quantitative questionnaires and certain qualitative methods will be used to find the causes of the problems and possible solutions, but health education mainly focuses on knowledge, attitude, beliefs and behaviors, while health management also focuses on obtaining information from physical examination data and emphasizing long-term sustainable management of lifestyle and behavior.
Health education pays more attention to the changes of knowledge, attitude and behavior of the target population when making plans, while health management plans should put forward individualized measures based on risk assessment.
In the process of implementation, health education usually adopts the strategy of education communication and even policy to educate and intervene the target population, and health management usually adopts lifestyle intervention and health disease consultation and guidance.
In terms of evaluation, health education will be further subdivided into process evaluation, effect evaluation and result evaluation, and health management is similar to it, except that the content focuses more on behavior monitoring, improvement of health indicators and changes of health risks.
The role of health education in health management
Health management is to bring health monitoring and maintenance of health-related behaviors, as well as treatment and rehabilitation into management and implement intervention. Interventions are mainly non-clinical methods and educational management, so health education is a very basic and important method and strategy for both individual health management and group health management.
The function in individual health management is to collect health information for individuals. The design of questionnaires is similar to those commonly used in health education. In health education questionnaires, questions related to behavior and lifestyle and the needs of health education are often asked.
When intervening in individual health education, we should use the strategies of interpersonal communication and behavior intervention commonly used in health education, so being familiar with and mastering the theoretical and practical skills of health education is the basis for realizing effective individual health management.
The role in group health management is that in the field of health management, health managers should not only do individualized health management, but also face group health intervention based on communities, enterprises and institutions, schools and other places.
Health education and health promotion are important tools, methods and strategies for group health management.
The basic steps of design, implementation and evaluation of health education plan are basically consistent with information collection, health risk assessment, education, intervention and effect evaluation of health management.
Similar to individual information collection, the questionnaire content of group information collection is similar to that commonly used in health education.
In group health intervention, health managers should use more comprehensive and diversified means than individuals to create a healthy social and community environment and work and family atmosphere.
Including social mobilization strategies for health promotion, theories and methods of group behavior intervention, skills and methods of mass communication and interpersonal communication.