Читать книгу Health Promotion Programs - (SOPHE) Society for Public Health Education - Страница 38

For the health and health promotion professionals, a new health promotion era is emerging from the pandemic. COVID-19 is now part of our lives. The work of promoting health gained prominence and importance, but at the same time is intertwined with larger and more volatile societal forces. Furthermore, health and health promotion are now a global challenge that requires a coordinated global response. The race to find vaccines, drugs, and effective testing is a global pursuit. This reality shapes our work.

It is a given that we carefully and continuously monitor socioeconomic factors. We know to identify environmental threats and opportunities, including changes in governmental policies, legislation, and public policy statements to help formulate and take action to promote the health of the individuals and communities for which we care and serve. In the new era fragmentation within the general population is accelerating, causing tension and conflict that at times creates both opportunities and barriers to health and improved quality of life for individuals and communities.

In the new era health promotion and healthcare practice uses digital information, artificial intelligence, and communication technologies to improve people’s health and healthcare. The increasing use of technologies, especially the Internet and personal mobile devices, to manage health highlights the potential of technology tools to improve population health. COVID-19 caused a massive acceleration in the use of telehealth. Consumer adoption skyrocketed, from 11 percent of U.S. consumers using telehealth to 46 percent of consumers now using telehealth to replace cancelled healthcare visits. No longer are healthcare and health promotion programs just at a given site (i.e. school, workplace, clinic, hospital). Technology supports individuals’ engagement and full participation in promoting their health as well as being decision makers in their healthcare. We are not limited to a physical place, and therefore health promotion programs are not limited to a particular site. They can and do work within homes, schools, universities, communities, and workplaces, thereby involving family, colleagues, peers, co-workers, and friends. A key in the new health era is equity in peoples’ capacity and resources to access technology to promote their health.

In the new era, health promotion is intertwined within the healthcare system which is dominated by large commercial interests driven by investors’ demand for profit, by non-profits almost equally focused on revenues, and by government policy decisions that are sometimes shaped by larger ideological, political, and budgetary concerns. For better and worse, healthcare has become big money and big politics. As a result, for the foreseeable future, the structure and cost of healthcare in the United States will continue to be a problem. The healthcare system is overwhelming for even the most sophisticated consumer. We need to know how to navigate the systems for ourselves and the people we serve.

Health is political. It is part of the American psyche. The health of Americans is a priority, but what that means—and what role the federal government plays—has changed significantly over the years and particularly in relation to promoting health. While many Presidents of the United States have made incremental changes to federal health policy and the American psyche, it has often been those changes that affect our social determinants that had the greatest influence on our access to better healthcare, health promotion, and prevention of disease.

The most recent example of governmental health action is the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). While the ACA did not accomplish all of the reforms many had hoped, it opened the door for significant changes to the status quo and ensured that for decades its reforms are the starting point for future health reform and technologies. It can be expected, particularly in presidential election years candidates will campaign on platforms to dismantle the ACA, call to replace it with a more universally available healthcare plan, while others will want to improve the ACA.