Health and Health Promotion According to Public Health Agency (2001), Health is an ingredient of life that enables individuals to be independent socially, and live economical lives. Health is a concept that emphasizes social and personal resources. All action directed towards health, social and economic development should aim at providing human needs including peace, basic needs, and access to basic human rights. Understanding all the fundamental requirements of health will help in understanding health and the need to provide these fundamentals because the fundamentals are essential to human beings. Health affects the social, mental, and spiritual being of an individual. Precisely, health means being physically healthy and sane influencing the individual to act in a way that promotes health

Health promotion is the practices of ensuring people have complete control over the fundamental needs of health, leading to improvement of their health. Health promotion is a concept and set of guidelines addressing health challenges globally including communicable and non-communicable diseases, and human development and health issues. This promotion aims at harnessing people to take action in order to gain control over fundamental needs of health and positive change. Health is an achievable goal. It is the only challenge faced worldwide. In order to terminate poverty, increase education, and employment opportunities, the economy should improve. Improving economy will improve the health and well-being of individuals.

Perception of health by an individual is according to their experience of harmful health. This means that an event of ill health leads to appreciation of health. People who have not experienced ill health take health for granted. The overall understanding of health concept constitutes ground for health promotion, and health promotion is everything that may improve the health of a society. Health is a subjective situation that varies from situation to situation, understanding this will enhance health management in complex situations. In a bid to explain health and health promotion, several theories have developed. Let us look at two of the theories of health promotion.

Theories of Health Promotion

Social cognitive theory

Bandura (1998) advanced this theory in 1963, initially referred to as the theory of social learning. This theory deals with concepts of behavior to understand the changes in behaviors. In this way, the theory shows the relevance in health communication. In understanding behavior, the theory provides ways of researching into new behaviors in health education. The theory explains how people acquire and maintain certain behaviors, and subsequently provides ways of prevention strategies. Environment, people, and behavior affect behavior change. Bandura (1998) explains that environment exists in two forms including social and physical forms. The social environment includes friends, family members, and colleagues.

The physical environment includes the size of a room, the ambient temperature, and availability of certain foods. The environment and situation provide the basis for understanding behavior. In this case, situation is the cognitive or mental representations of environment that may influence behavior and behavior change. The three factors people, environment, and change are constantly affecting each other. The environment affects the behavior through the three factors. The three factors affect behavior and influenced change (Bandura, 1998).

The theory explains the behavior through a three-way approach where individual factors, environmental factors and behavior continually interact to enhance behavior adoption and change. Different people have different capabilities of learning behaviors from other people. Some people may resist behavior learning while others will reciprocate to the behaviors by incorporating them and becoming part of them. Some behaviors are negative, and they add no value to health patterns. Self-efficacy, determinism is key concepts from this theory.

The way people behave reveals certain actions that some people learn by observing and watching what other people are doing. In turn, they receive the actions and reinforcements. The theory of social cognitive is relevant for designing health education, and health behavior programs. The theory explains how people acquire and maintain certain behavior changes. The theory can provide the basis for intervention strategies (Bandura, 1998).

Organizational Change

Health promotion is a well-defined...

Health promotion has proven in being a vital subject within the health sector. It continues to be a challenge because of the manner in how they handle this issue with no seriousness. To enhance effectiveness, health promotion technologies and practices need to address strongly and seriously by the health sector and organizations in other sectors (Heward, Hutchins, & Keleher, 2007).
Health promotion requires developed infrastructure, an able workforce, and resources needed in order to provide high quality health promotions in various organizations inside and outside the health sector. In most cases, the requirements for effective health promotions have proven difficult to meet. Recognizing these requirements, adoption of organization theory, and training in building capacity aims to enhance the design, and evaluations for health promotions. For health promotion to work, focusing on the aspects of health promotions is a key step. This will enhance the development. Health promotion practitioners and specialists should adopt organizational change to build practice and capacity buildings because, effectiveness of health promotions is at risk (Heward, Hutchins, & Keleher, 2007).

Theories in practice

The ability to apply learned activities influences the outcome of nursing care offered to a patient. Skilled and competent workforce should ensure safety, recognition, and response to patients in need of clinical needs appropriately. It is beneficial to provide people with skills to seek, analyze, and use information effectively for success in implementing the theories in practice. For nurses to implement the health promotional theories, they must know how to reflect critically without help from their mentors or superiors. During training of clinical officers, training should not confine in the classroom, to kill that monotony, practical knowledge will successfully help to implement the theories in action.

Theoretical foundation is critical for nurses to describe how people learn and perform. Learning methods should not differ with the methods used for teaching, to help the clinical officers to get the full understanding of the subject, and theory in order to apply it in practice. In adapting a practice model, quality highlights the importance of supervision as part of the learning strategy. Supervision is the most significant element in clinical instruction. Mentorship enhances learning opportunities, and supervises and evaluates in the practice setting.

Evaluation and Barriers to Effective Promotional Health activities

Ignorance to seriously addressing health promotional activities by most of the health sectors, and organizations out of the health sector has led to ineffective promotional of health activities. This factor has lead to barriers in effective delivery of health services to patients. Ignorance of technologies involved in effective delivery of health activities has lead to poor delivery of health activities to patients. Settings including, schools, worksite, and healthcare constitute an important dimension in adoption and delivery of health promotional activities to patients (Rosenstock, Strecher & Becker, 1998).

The constituents are weak evidentiary base for health promotion to patients and subsequent adoption of the same. Effective health promotion requires developed infrastructure, trained personnel, and funds in order to reach patients and enhance adoption of health promotion. The requirements are under- developed creating a barrier to the effective delivery of health activities to patients.

Currently issues in health promotion evaluations led to close examination. These issues are the definition, and measurement of relevant outcomes to effective health promotions and the integration of evaluation methods aimed at assessing outcomes achieved and the process that lead to its achievement. Health promotion evaluation is a complex activity that requires measures and sophisticated evaluation designs which, acknowledges the complexity of this health promotion evaluation are those that are long-term, not easily predicted and measured by conventional methods (Rosenstock, Strecher & Becker, 1998). It is essential to develop evaluation programs that combine advantages of different research methodologies aiming at relevance to the development stage of the program. In evaluation, the use…