2. The first chapter is called The Imperative for Primary Prevention. It talks about how important primary prevention is and how it helps health care system not to be overbooked because less people would need medical care. Also, the chapter presents individual-based prevention and treatment model, as well as shows recent and historical examples of prevention successes.
The second chapter is called Achieving Health Equity and Social Justice. This chapter talks about how health differences are primarily the result of social structures and processes, rather than individual genetic factors. It also discussed how making the community environment healthier can decrease the number of people who become ill or injured.
The third chapter is called Gender, Health, and Prevention. It focuses on how gender affects health outcomes.
The fourth chapter is called The Hope of Prevention: Individual, Family, and Community Resilience. This chapter talks about how strong social networks and partnerships, caring relationships between community members, and education and literacy are protective factors and help people grow stronger. These factors also prevent illnesses and injuries.
3. I learned that primary prevention should generally be aimed at populations, not just individuals. A goal of primary prevention is to eliminate unnecessary illnesses, injuries, and even deaths.
I learned about health disparities and health equity. Health disparities are defined as “differences in health that are not only avoidable and unnecessary, but in addition unjust and unfair.” (Margaret Whitehead, 1990). Health equity is defined as “providing all people with fair opportunities to attain their full health potential to the extent possible.” (Braveman, 2006).
You can read more about health disparities and health equity from Wikipedia:
I learned that we should consider gender differences when we want to improve individual’s health.
Also, I learned about resilience research and practice which provides the prevention field with nothing less than a fundamentally different knowledge base, one offering the promise of transforming interventions. Resilience is defined as “a class of phenomena characterized by patterns of positive adaptation in the context of significant adversity or risk” (Masten & Reed, 2002).
You can read more about resilience from Wikipedia:
4. I think we should pay more attention to the primary prevention and try to prevent people from become ill or injured. I think it starts with health educators to teach people in communities how to prevent diseases and eliminate health disparities.
I personally think primary prevention is a very important thing as well! I am always going out of my way to take care of myself BEFORE I get sick. I take a daily vitamin, try to eat healhty, and exercise. I think even these few things have kept me out of the doctors office a few times.
ReplyDeleteI think we need to focus on community health as well. We cannot focus our attention on individuals and expect anything to change!
ReplyDeleteI agree, I think this is an important issue that needs to be addressed. Change will only occur if everyone comes together.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds that this book will be a great ally to health educators when job searching and convincing companies how important our role in the community actually is. Since we know how to set up programs and whatnot to help prevent poor health behaviors and choices, it will be great to use this book as a reference.
ReplyDeleteThat all makes a lot of sense, I never thought how the impact of just doing the little things to make sure you don't get sick can be so huge. Looking forward to the rest of your book.
ReplyDeleteThis seems interesting so far. I agree that change can be hard to accomplish, so people do need to all come together. I am looking forward to hearing more about this topic.
ReplyDeleteThis looks like a good read. It is a good thing to have primary prevention to decrease diseases and such. This book seems really helpful for our futures.
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