Introduction
This topic covers health culture and its elements, health behaviour and its motives, the dimensions of health, and humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
Health culture
- Health culture is broadly defined as a culture in which good health and well-being flourish across geographic, demographic and social sectors, allowing everyone in the community the opportunity to make choices that lead to healthy lifestyles.
- It is part of the general culture, classified as material and spiritual, objective and subjective. It includes a set of knowledge, beliefs, skills and behaviour related to the protection of personal and public health.
Elements of health culture
- Health skill: the ability to perform a specific health action.
- Health habit: a health skill perfected and consolidated after repeated practice (multiple repetition, imitation and reinforcement).
- Health behaviour: the combination of all health habits and skills expressed by the individual.
Health behaviour
- Health behaviour is an action taken by a person to maintain, attain or regain good health and to prevent illness.
- It reflects a person's health beliefs and affects the person's health status.
- Examples: exercising regularly, eating a balanced diet, obtaining necessary immunisation, washing hands, good hygiene, sexual behaviour (use of condoms).
- Aided by parents: milk from the mother, washing the baby, changing clothes.
- Health culture and behaviour both contribute to the current and future level of health.
- Health is a dynamic process because it is always changing: we all have good health, times of sickness and maybe even times of serious illness. As our lifestyle changes, so does our level of health.
Motives for health behaviour
- Health-rational motives: based on knowledge and awareness of the benefit of performing a certain health action. They depend on the individual's perception of illness, the assessment of the body's resistance and of the real threat of illness under existing living and working conditions. Characteristic of the elderly and chronically ill.
- Psycho-physiological motives: based on the emotions or physical experiences accompanying certain actions, e.g. refraining from visiting the dentist because of the pain of dental treatment, or not attending a check-up for fear of detecting a malignancy.
- Aesthetic motives: related to the aesthetic views and ideals of the individual. They usually generate healthy behaviour (rational eating, sport, smoking cessation). Extremes and blindly following fashion trends can lead to irrational health behaviours (irrational diets, inappropriate beauty products).