Health education monographs最新文献

This article presents the case of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Health Center's unique community management system in which neighborhood workers have been developed to assume managerial responsibilities and are directing the Center. The Martin Luther King Center experience is instructive because the Center was able to achieve significant community control by focusing primarily on the internal dimension of control, namely, management, without experiencing destructive conflicts and the deterioration of health services.

Differences between various models in the organization of health education services are explored. New developments in health education approaches used in training, career structures, and job definitions in some European countries are summarized. Problem areas have been defined and recommendations have been produced by numerous activities of the World Health Organization in recent years. At a 1974 symposium, it became obvious that no planned manpower development is feasible without a job definition of the health educator as an educational product. The need to specify the aims of future developments requires taking a critical view of past developments and spelling out existing differences.

Two samples of women aborting in New York and Connecticut during 1972 and 1973 were studied. In all, six hundred and fifty eight women about to undergo first and second trimester procedures completed a self-administered questionnaire. Items include: demographic, psychosocial and personality parameters, and a detailed review of the decision process leading to abortion. Analyses of the correlates of delay are organized around four components: acknowledgment of pregnancy; seeing a physician ; deciding to abort; and locating a clinic. Other analyses focus on the role of decisional conflict in delay. Methodological issues, implications for educational practice and for theory of decision-making are discussed.

This study presents a broad epidemiological approach to evaluation of drug education. Data on adolescent drug use and on drug-related beliefs and perceptions, collected yearly over a three-year period in 33 schools in the Greater New Haven area, were analyzed in relation to information on drug education programs in these schools. Changes in the general prevalence rates for the study period (1970-1973) and with age were the background against which the effects of the independent variable--presence or absence of specific drug education activities in the various schools--were explored. While the overall evidence suggested that drug education does not have a strong, across-the-board influence on either drug use rates or beliefs and perceptions, more modest and specific effects were noted which have implications for drug education.

A combination of forces favor the expansion of health education efforts in hospitals. This article describes four areas of health education in clinical settings: the justification for a health educator in this setting; his preparation; his role as a member of the health care team; and the extended role of the educator in the community, with voluntary and official agencies, and with families of patients.

Accounts of early activities of public health educators, statements of the American Public Health Association on the qualifications and functions of these educators, and studies concerned with their responsbiliities, functions, work, or roles are reviewed. These point up the three major foci in public health education over time in the U.S., viz, dissemination of information, community organization, and health behavior and program planning. Functions of public health educators in emerging settings for practice are presented and the implications of this movement (i.e., movement of health educators into non-traditional settings) for public health education profession are discussed.

Twenty-seven studies were reviewed to determine whether school-based drug abuse prevention efforts have succeeded. Most of the studies reviewed either did not examine program impact on actual drug using behavior or were not designed with a degree of scientific rigor sufficient to warrant acceptance of their findings as valid. Those studies leading to reliable results regarding program effect on drug use were contradictory in their conclusions. In view of the possibility that educational efforts aimed at drug abuse prevention may be counterproductive, it is suggested that school-based programs henceforward be designed and conducted as experiments with controlled manipulation of relevant variables.

Epidemiological and experimental studies provide evidence that a complex of behavioral, biological and environmental factors interact in the etiology of many cardiovascular diseases. A survey of research and theory concerning training and counseling programs for adult populations is provided. Six basic behavioral recommendations are made for the maintenance of cardiovascular health. Problems in the design of mass media and interpersonal campaigns to alter the health habits of large populations are considered.