Recommended Health Promotion Interventions
For the designed prevention plan to succeed, it is essential to address both enrollees and care providers as part of planned interventions. For provider interventions, the key goals are to enhance screening levels and improve their knowledge of strategies to motivate and educate patients to enhance their lifestyle. Therefore, an educational intervention for providers would be beneficial since it would help to achieve these goals at minimal additional cost.
For enrollees, however, education might not be enough to achieve long-term behavioral change. In today’s world, most people know about the dangers of an unhealthy diet, sedentary lifestyle, and smoking, but lack the motivation and skills to make a lasting change. Therefore, enrollees would require a multi-component cognitive-behavioral intervention that would provide both the knowledge and skills needed to alter their habits. The intervention should be carried out in groups as this would allow participants to share their experiences and receive support in a positive social environment.
Addressing community policies and environments to achieve change usually requires upstream interventions that establish strict regulations aimed to reduce the prevalence of unhealthy habits. However, given that the plan is focused on a particular community, it might be effective to use a midstream intervention involving social marketing. This would help to raise awareness of lifestyle change intervention while also encouraging people to address their bad habits.
Additionally, it would be useful to provide workplace interventions for companies purchasing the health plan for their workers. For instance, the organization could arrange for a physical assessment of employees on-site followed by an educational intervention on a healthy lifestyle.
Supporting Evidence
All three types of interventions recommended above are based on strong theoretical models, such as the social learning theory, and their positive effect has been proven by various research studies. For instance, multi-component cognitive lifestyle intervention was delivered to groups of participants by the Look AHEAD Research Group (2014) and resulted in 17% of participants losing over 10% of their body mass during the project.
Another study by Stoner, Mikko, and Carpenter (2014), tested the influence of educational interventions on provider behaviors regarding screening, interventions, and referrals for substance abuse.
The results of the intervention showed increased knowledge and improved clinical practices, including screenings and referrals. Lastly, workplace health promotion interventions are considered to be useful in enhancing employees’ adherence to healthy habits. For example, a systematic review of workplace interventions aimed at increasing physical activities showed that most of them achieved a statistically significant improvement (Malik, Blake, & Suggs, 2014). Thus, if all interventions are applied correctly, they are likely to help achieve the organization’s health promotion goals.
Implementation Challenges
Despite the potential benefits of the plan, there are still some barriers that could hurt the implementation process. Firstly, potential participants may have low awareness of interventions and poor motivation to participate. To address these challenges and encourage people to enroll, it would be helpful to use social marketing in popular community areas. Secondly, due to a large number of potential participants and the wide scope of topics to be covered during the intervention, the organization might face financial and personnel constraints. These challenges could be addressed by providing non -financial incentives to workers involved in the interventions. For instance, nurses and doctors delivering provider education interventions could be regarded with additional vacation days.
References
Look AHEAD Research Group. (2014). Eight-year weight losses with an intensive lifestyle intervention: The look AHEAD study. Obesity, 22(1), 5-13.
Malik, S. H., Blake, H., & Suggs, L. S. (2014). A systematic review of workplace health promotion interventions for increasing physical activity. British Journal of Health Psychology, 19(1), 149-180.
Stoner, S. A., Mikko, A. T., & Carpenter, K. M. (2014). Web-based training for primary care providers on screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment (SBIRT) for alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, 47(5), 362-370.