Health Promotion, Health Education, and Behavior Change
Health Promotion, Health Education, and Behavior Change
This domain tests how programs enable people and communities to improve health, not merely how to give information. Expect questions on the Ottawa Charter, behavior-change theories, planning models, and evaluation.
Core rules and concepts
- The Ottawa Charter actions are build healthy public policy, create supportive environments, strengthen community action, develop personal skills, and reorient health services. Health education is one tool within health promotion.
- The health belief model emphasizes perceived susceptibility, severity, benefits, barriers, cues to action, and self-efficacy.
- The transtheoretical model stages behavior as precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and sometimes termination. Interventions should match the stage.
- Social cognitive theory highlights observational learning, self-efficacy, and reciprocal determinism among person, behavior, and environment.
- PRECEDE-PROCEED begins with quality-of-life and health outcomes, then assesses predisposing, enabling, and reinforcing factors before implementation and evaluation.
Worked example
A clinic wants to reduce smoking. For patients in precontemplation, a leaflet demanding immediate quitting is mismatched. Better reasoning is to raise awareness of personalized risk and explore ambivalence, then use motivational interviewing. For those in preparation, set a quit date, offer pharmacotherapy, and arrange follow-up. For maintenance, build coping plans and social support. The stage, not the clinician's urgency, determines the method.
Traps that cost marks
Do not assume knowledge alone changes behavior. Do not blame individuals while ignoring upstream determinants. Do not call a poster campaign health promotion if it only informs. Do not apply an action-stage intervention to people who are not yet contemplating change.