Prevention in healthcare and social science entails many activities defined as interventions. Experts in the field seek to reduce threats or risks to health. In this instance, they determine that healthcare falls into three categories based on a patient’s stage in the illness. Prevention involves primary, secondary, and tertiary care. In most instances, prevention requires utilizing all three forms of care, depending on the stage individuals affected exhibit symptoms.
In this instance, using a hypothetical town can illustrate how each of the preventive styles is used in healthcare. One should assume the leader of this makeshift town makes decisions involving a swimming area utilized by children and adults. The area’s residents begin getting afflicted by a strange illness one day, developing painful pimples. Research indicates that going in the water exposes someone to a chemical irritant in the water.
The first solution involves approaching the company responsible for the upstream chemical spill. Taking action as the leader, the ruler develops a plan to eliminate this discharge, utilizing primary prevention to remove the problem’s source (Medpgnotes, 2019). In this case, eradicating hazardous exposure prevents people from developing the pimples.
Secondly, the leader may choose to ask lifeguards for help in determining if individuals who swim in the affected areas exhibit any sign of these pimples. These people are treated immediately. It is a form of secondary prevention as people are treated as fast as possible for symptoms involving the illness (WHO, 2022). While your actions are not preventing people from getting the pimples, fast action reduces the affliction’s impact through early treatment (Medpgnotes, 2019). In this way, swimming enthusiasts may gain health and proceed with their lives.
Finally, the leader may choose to provide information via a community-wide campaign that helps them deal with the painful pimples. In this case, the town leader would employ tertiary prevention (Medpgnotes, 2019). Individuals exhibiting symptoms of these pimples would have difficulty understanding and dealing with the problems if they did not have this information (Kisling & Das, 2022). This reduces the severity of the illness in this group.
Reference
Kisling, L. A., & Das, J. M. (2022). Prevention Strategies. National Library of Medicine.
Medpgnotes. (2019). Social and Preventive Medicine: For Medical Entrance Examinations. Medpgnotes.
W.H.O. (2022). Epho5: Disease prevention, including early detection of illness. World Health Organization. Web.