Health Promotion by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CAB International

Alignment of digital communication to health promotion principles

As we have outlined, the normative ideal of health promotion is about equity, equality and social justice, a value-based, political and ethical activity. Internet interconnectiveness aids collaboration, participation and co-production, which can lead to personal and societal empowerment and stimulate critical thinking/bottom-up information processing and therefore aligns with health promotion principles. However, digital health promotion focuses on a behaviour- and lifestyle-change approach, shaped by a neoliberal environment. This, combined with traditional education and medical approaches to health, distances health promotion practice from its normative ideal (O’Neil, 2019). Health promotion is an anti-oppressive activity, working towards social reform and redressing imbalances of power. It is about addressing the causes of powerlessness and disempowerment. Digitalized interventions tend to focus on individual empowerment rather than collective or community empowerment. With its pathological and medicalized approach, it can be difficult for health promoters to meet the ideals of a social model approach that aligns with the principles and values of health promotion practice (O’Neil, 2019).

The principles of health promotion are also about choice and control. Digital health promotion relies on people’s high self-efficacy for self-management. Control theory and social cognitive theory that underpin behaviour change health promotion activities advocate the use of feedback (Kramer and Kowatsch, 2017). Interactive personalized feedback and support can help motivate, guide, enable and empower people through the change process in the connected world. Internet-based behaviour change interventions can be effective, depending on the different combinations of design features (Mielewczyk and Willig, 2007; Michie et al., 2012; Cohn, 2014; Morrison et al., 2014). However, evaluation of behaviour change interventions is rare, inadequate and/or inadequately shared. The effectiveness of digital technology on patient engagement and behaviour change is also unclear (Morrison et al., 2014).

The individualistic approach to health as seen in many digitalized interventions is based on freedom of choice with minimal government intervention and market fundamentalism. This has shifted the responsibility of health care from the government and health professionals to the people to become the ideal responsible citizens and ideal digitally engaged patients (Lupton, 2012). The burden of health shifts to the individual rather than the state (Ayo, 2010). The preoccupation of this health consciousness, facilitated by a consumer society, has become part of capitalist society in what Crawford (1980) described as healthism, with people taking responsibility to achieve good health, benefitting not only themselves but also the society. However, behaviour change not only depends on the person, but it also depends on the external social, economic, political and environmental factors that influence people’s decision-making processes and the context of their behavioural practices (Mielewczyk and Willig, 2007; Cohn, 2014). Focusing on health practice would help health promoters design appropriate interventions (for example, through building an online community on social-networking sites that incorporates discussion where people can share experience and support each other).

The health of a nation is both personal and collective. It requires change at individual and societal levels. Health promotion needs both individualist and structuralist approaches to health (Bandura, 2004). It

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