Title: Summary
Course: Level 3 - Health Education and Promotion > Section: Human behaviour and health

In this Study Session, you have learned that:

- Behaviour is any action that has a specific frequency, duration and purpose whether conscious or unconscious. It is "what we do and how we act". People stay healthy or become ill, often as a result of their action or behaviour.
- There are healthy as well as unhealthy behaviours. Preventive, illness, compliance and utilisation behaviours are best examples of a health behaviour. Feeding additional foods for a child who is under six months, defecating in an open field, doing sexual intercourse without a condom and other similar individual or community activities are examples of unhealthy behaviours.
- There are three main determinants of human health:
  - Human biology (e.g.: age, sex), life styles of an individual (behaviour).
  - The environment (physical/ecological and socio-economic).
  - The availability, accessibility and affordability of the health care organisations.
- In line with this, we have also tried to see that there are modifiable or changeable risk factors (e.g.: cigarette smoking) and non-modifiable or non-changeable risk factors (e.g.: age, sex)
- There are three levels of disease prevention: primary, secondary and tertiary.
  - In the primary level of prevention, health education is designed and given to healthy individuals.
  - In the secondary level of prevention, health education is designed and given to limit the further progression of the disease or health problem.
  - In the tertiary level of prevention, health education is designed and given to those individuals who have a serious illness to prolong their life and to protect them from further complications that may end up with death or disability.
- There are two types of approaches to behaviour change in health education:
  - Persuasive or directive and
  - Informed-decision making approaches.
- There are three models of disease causation and spread:
  - The infection link model. This deals with the chain of disease transmission from one source or host to another source or host.
  - The communicable disease model. This refers to the presence of factors (host, environment and agent) for a communicable disease to occur and spread.
  - The multi-causal diseases model. This explains the onset of a disease caused by more than one factor.
- The first two models apply to the communicable diseases, and the third one is usually applicable to the chronic non-communicable diseases like heart diseases and cancers. This is mainly because such and other similar diseases are not caused by a single factor, rather they need more than one factor or causal agents.
- No matter which model is applied to explain disease causation and spread, health education has a very important role in reducing the spread and transmission of diseases through helping people reducing their health risks.