Health Promotion: Behavior Change, Policy, and Public Health Outcomes

This discussion emphasizes the critical role of behavior changes in improving public health outcomes and reducing healthcare costs. It validates the importance of addressing socioeconomic disparities in health behaviors, as disadvantaged populations often face barriers to accessing healthcare and adopting healthy practices. The response highlights the necessity of policy regulations and interventions that consider public attitudes and psychological factors to promote behavior change, particularly among socially disadvantaged groups. It underscores the need for targeted interventions that address the underlying issues of education, resources, and co-existing health problems to capitalize on opportunities for improving individual and population health.

Running head: HEALTH PROMOTION
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1HEALTH PROMOTION
The discussion is true in identifying the importance of behaviour changes, in relation
to public health. Research evidences have indicated the need of saving healthcare associated
costs, in order to focus more on disease prevention, thereby establishing the discussion.
Truthfulness of the discussion can be validated by the fact that increased costs make people
refrain themselves from using healthcare facilities in low and middle income countries (Giles et
al. 2014).
Furthermore, health behaviours have been found to display a socio-economic gradient
that makes the advantaged population display better health outcomes, and longer life expectancy.
Thus, the need of bringing about a change in behaviour towards specific pharmaceutical or non-
pharmaceutical interventions is essential to improve the overall health status of all individuals
(Ahnquist, Wamala and Lindstrom 2012). Association between poor health and negative
behaviour towards interventions therefore confirm the need of bringing about policy regulations
that would change acceptance of the interventions (Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2007). The
fact that this discussion focuses on the importance of considering public attitudes is established
by research findings which illustrate the need of identifying the underlying conditions that
preceded psychological and social behaviour of an individual towards proposed treatments
(Hollands et al. 2013).
Thus, the discussion is accurate in that there is a need address the gap prevalent among
socially disadvantaged group, to change their behaviour. This can be attributed to lack of
education, resources, and co-existing health and social problems (Peters, De Bruin and Crutzen
2015). Therefore, there is indeed a need to bring about health behaviour change to capitalize on
the opportunities that will facilitate addressing health risks of individuals and populations.

2HEALTH PROMOTION
References
Ahnquist, J., Wamala, S.P. and Lindstrom, M., 2012. Social determinants of health–a question of
social or economic capital? Interaction effects of socioeconomic factors on health
outcomes. Social Science & Medicine, 74(6), pp.930-939.
Giles, E.L., Robalino, S., McColl, E., Sniehotta, F.F. and Adams, J., 2014. The effectiveness of
financial incentives for health behaviour change: systematic review and meta-analysis. PloS
one, 9(3), p.e90347.
Hollands, G.J., Shemilt, I., Marteau, T.M., Jebb, S.A., Kelly, M.P., Nakamura, R., Suhrcke, M.
and Ogilvie, D., 2013. Altering micro-environments to change population health behaviour:
towards an evidence base for choice architecture interventions. BMC public health, 13(1),
p.1218.
Nuffield Council on Bioethics (Great Britain), 2007. Public health: ethical issues. Nuffield
Council on Bioethics. Retrieved from-
http://nuffieldbioethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Public-health-Chapter-3-Policy-process-
and-practice.pdf
Peters, G.J.Y., De Bruin, M. and Crutzen, R., 2015. Everything should be as simple as possible,
but no simpler: towards a protocol for accumulating evidence regarding the active content of
health behaviour change interventions. Health Psychology Review, 9(1), pp.1-14.