The Health Promotion Project
All nations develop policies for ensuring effective health promotion. Government expenditures on programs that promote health within a state or nation are justified by the fact that a healthy nation is more productive. Health promotion seeks to respond to various known risk factors in a bid to control diseases (Needle, Petchey, Benson, Scriven, Lawrenson, & Hilari, 2011). After identifying such risk factors, the next step entails putting in place programs for reducing the contribution of the risks that influence negatively the health of individuals or communities. This paper treats tobacco use as a health risk factor in San Francisco. The topic of the project is ‘reducing tobacco use by adults. The purpose of the project is to discuss various strategies for implementing health promotion programs such as the ‘You Can Quit Tobacco Use Program,’ through LA Tobacco Use Rehabilitation Center as a hypothetical organization.
The goal of the project is to reduce tobacco use among residents in San Francisco. In this effort, the project seeks to enhance tobacco use cessation. The project targets young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 years. From the data provided by the US Department of Health and Human Services (2012), this cohort constitutes the group of people who have a higher prevalence rate of tobacco use. Many people start smoking without the consciousness of the impacts of tobacco use. The goal of the project also entails presenting such awareness as an important factor in reducing the initiation of tobacco use among young adults. Realization of this goal is expected to reduce the impact of media adverts in terms of portraying tobacco product use as a positive behavior.
The project is of great significance in the advanced practice roles of nursing students. I have personal roles to ensure the promotion of quality healthcare in the future. Nurses have the role of utilizing their knowledge and evidence-based approaches for individual and communal health management. This research provides an opportunity for studying the practical challenges and success in implementing community and individual health care programs for health promotion. I also have an advanced role in participating in health care leadership. This role entails proposing and participating in the development of policies and programs for enhancing quality health among individuals and communities.
Upon implementation of programs for health promotion, the next phase constitutes their evaluation (Seong, Park, Cheong, Seo & Kim, 2014). Apart from policy formulations, nurses have advanced roles and responsibilities for evaluating the outcomes of health promotion programs. The project is significant to this extent since it provides an opportunity for assessing and evaluating the success of the tobacco use reduction program. This research provides an opportunity to develop such information while at the same time examining the impact of such information on soliciting people to change their behaviors that lead to their engagement in risk factors that ruin their health.
Developing effective programs for reducing social costs in communities requires the possession of data for tobacco use and the efficacy of various past programs for reducing tobacco consumption. Consequently, secondary data sources from credible online libraries, institutions, and governmental organizations are utilized in the research. Governmental organization sources of data include CDC and the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Literature Synthesis and Analytical Report
Literature Synthesis
There is very wide literature on tobacco use and its repercussions among young adults. However, the problem of tobacco use will be addressed in the context of theories of health promotion. The theories aid in predicting the outcomes of any therapeutic interventions for dealing with a health challenge. Data from the US Department of Health and Human Services, (2012) reveals the ‘Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Act, which controls the use of tobacco products in the US through the power in charge of foodstuffs and drug management. While some health promotion theories seek to address health problems at an individual level, others approach them at a communal level (Aubin, Farley, Lycett, Lahmek & Aveyard, 2012). To encourage quitting, different states have provided free cessation telephone lines and subsidized cessation treatment while at the same time assisting persons who wish to quit. The current research uses the ecological conceptual framework in the development of health promotion programs. The framework includes individuals, genetic, and individual risk factors, living conditions, neighborhoods, institutions, and social and economic policies.
Analytical Report
From an ecological perspective, the health promotion program that is considered in this paper uses the trans-theoretical stages of change model. The theory looks at behavioral change from the context of a set of processes as opposed to a series of isolated events that lead to the change. For a change in risky behaviors, an individual undergoes five main stages, namely pre-contemplation, meditation, groundwork, action, and preservation (Patterson & Nochajski, 2010). Consistent with the theory, many efforts by different states in the US have focused on looking for strategies of enabling people to quit smoking. However, the main challenge of the programs has been to prevent relapse.
In the pre-contemplation phase, the ‘You Can Quit Tobacco Use Program’ will focus on inducing motivation for people to quit using tobacco. This stage involves taking them through workshops that involve sharing life experiences with people who have suffered from tobacco use-associated ailments. Such an effort complies with the trans-theoretical stage theory since it provides potential candidates for the program with an opportunity to pre-contemplate and/or weigh up the decision to enroll in the tobacco use cessation program (Finnell & Jezewski, 2011). In the groundwork phase for trans-theoretical theory, health promotional strategy focuses on ensuring that the target audience of the programs only concentrates on developing appropriate behaviors, which reduce its exposure to health problems risk factors (Finnell & Jezewski, 2011). This situation implies that the target audience of the ‘You Can Quit Tobacco Use Program’ aims at ensuring success in cessation rather than contemplating on whether the victims will successfully quit smoking. Thus, the plan is directed towards inducing positive behavior.
The action involves the actual interventions for reducing or encouraging quitting. For the ‘You Can Quit Tobacco Use Program’, this step will involve medicinal and therapeutic action. The medication action involves administering drugs such as NRT (Nicotine Replacement Therapy and TP (Transdermal Patches). Such medication is administered under the guidance and help of a health professional to reduce the dependency of tobacco use among participants of the ‘You Can Quit Tobacco Use Program’. The therapeutic intervention involves engaging people in workshops where such citizens share their experiences in tobacco use and the implication of its use.
‘You Can Quit Tobacco Use’ health promotion program also considers the importance of maintaining tobacco use abstinence, especially upon considering that nicotine is highly addictive. This aspect corresponds to the maintenance stage in the trans-theoretical theory. Maintenance seeks to instill coping skills to people who undergo the treatment process in an effort to foster long-term abstinence (Benowitz & Benowitz, 2010). The ‘You Can Quit Tobacco Use Program’ expects its participants to maintain tobacco use abstinence since the workshops create enough fear with reference to suffering from ailments that are associated with tobacco use. The setting of the programs is in LA at San Francisco. As revealed in section 1, its focus is on 18-25 young adults.
Reference List
Aubin, H., Farley, A., Lycett, D., Lahmek P., & Aveyard, P. (2012). Weight gain in smokers after quitting cigarettes: meta-analysis. BMJ-British Medical Journal, 345 (345), 4439-4451.
Benowitz, L., & Benowitz, N. (2010).Nicotine Addiction. New England Journal of Medicine 362(24), 2295–2303.
Finnell, D., & Jezewski, M. (2011). Applying the Transtheoretical Model to Health Care Proxy Completion. Medical Decision Making, 3(1), 254-259.
Needle, J., Petchey, P., Benson, J., Scriven, A., Lawrenson, J., & Hilari, K. (2011). The Role of Allied Health Professionals in Health Promotion. London: NIHR Service Delivery and Organization program.
Patterson, A., & Nochajski, H. (2010). Using the Stages of change model to help clients through the 12-steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Journal of Social Work Practice in the Addictions, 10(2), 224-227.
Seong, H., Park, E., Cheong, Y., Seo, S., & Kim, K. (2014). Heath Promotion and Diseases-Prevention Behaviors of Primary Care Practitioners. Korean Journal of Medicine, 35(1), 19-27.
US Department of Health and Human Services. (2012). Preventing Tobacco Use among Youth and Young Adults: A Report of the Surgeon General. Atlanta, GA: Center for Disease Control and Prevention.