Health promotion is the process that enables and supports people to adopt and maintain healthy lifestyles and have greater control over their health. It makes it possible for people to increase control over the determinants of health and thereby improve their health. According to Tones & Tilford (2001), public health professionals can try to promote and enhance the health of the world’s population by ensuring that communities have emergency medical responders, who are well trained, always to respond to emergencies quickly. This also involves licensing emergency medical technicians and paramedics, licensing emergency medical services instructors and ensuring ambulances are well-equipped and safe. The emergency medical service public health professionals should ensure a coordinated emergency medical service system that works to provide rapid and a high quality emergency care to all citizens.
It’s important that Public health professions educate all citizens on the importance of proper nutrition by promoting healthy eating habits, emphasizing that people should exercise regularly, conducting researching about the effect of putting on diet the elderly persons and teaching the dangers of excessive dieting and overeating (NLM, 2013). Public health professionals can also promote the health of an expectant woman and that of her an unborn child by improving and upgrading the delivery systems in hospitals all over the world, ensuring that transport is available to referral services, and that quality emergency obstetric care is available.
Public health professionals should aim at controlling infectious disease. Catford (2009) observes that they should educate parents on the importance of vaccinating children and also dispense vaccinations to children all over the world since vaccines have reduced and, in some cases, eliminated many diseases that have killed or severely disabled people such as polio, small pox, chicken pox and yellow fever. They should also make it mandatory the implementation of HIV/Aids awareness programs which educate people about how HIV/Aids is transmitted, and how to live a healthy life for those who are infected (Taylor, 2004). This is because the number of people living with Hiv/Aids has been increasing tremendously.
Maintaining a clean and healthy environment everywhere, is a key factor to increasing quality of life years of healthy life and increasing quality of life since humans are always interacting with the environment. Environmental health consists of preventing of injuries, disabilities and diseases related to the interactions between human beings and their environment, and also ways to control them. Research has shown that 25 percent deaths in the worldhave been caused by environmental factors such as; naturaldisasters, nutritional deficiencies,technological disasters, exposure to toxic elements in the water, air, food and soil (CDC, 2010). Thus, public health professionals should encourage citizens to keep a clean healthy environment.
Public health professionals should also implement sexual health education programs in schools to teach about abstinence as the best method for avoiding STDs and unintended pregnancy, also teaching about condoms and contraceptives to reduce the risk of unintended pregnancy and of infection with STDs and HIV (Taylor, 2004). It also teaches interpersonal and communication skills and helps young people explore their own values, goals, and options. They should also encourage implementation of drug education programs to teach about the negative impacts of drug abuse, how one can handle a drug addict and the steps to follow by an addict to recovery.
Heart disease is also one of the major leading causes of death in the world. The chance of one getting a heart disease increases as one ages. Thus, Health professionals should educate citizens on the many things one can do reduce their chances of getting heart diseases such as exercising regularly, avoid smoking, eating a lot of vegetables and fruits, knowing their blood pressureandcholesterol levels and keeping it under control and also keeping a healthy weight(NLM, 2013). Public health professionals also need to increase awareness about cancer. They need to educate people about the different types of cancer, the symptoms and encourage individuals to uptake screening programs for early detection of the cancer.
References
Catford, J. (2009) Advancing the Science of Delivery of Health Promotion: Not Just the Science of Discovery. Health Promotion International, 2009; 24(1): 1-5.
Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Improving the Nation’s Vision Health: A Coordinated Public Health Approach. CDC, 2010, pp. 1-58.
National Library of Medicine. (2013) Heart Diseases- Prevention. Retrieved on 22 Oct. 2013 from www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/heartdiseasesprevention.html
Taylor, G. (2004). Youths Serving Youths in Education Programs. Maryland: Scarecrow Education Press.
Tones,K. & Tilford, S. (2001).Health Promotion. Oxford: Nelson Thornes Ltd.
