One of the most important spheres of people’s lives is the health care system. It has many nuances and theories, and it is crucial for some people to know them. The purpose of this paper is to provide the definitions of needs and demands for services and explain the two reasons why it is important to distinguish them. Also, causal, intervention, and impact theories and the differences between them will be discussed.
Needs and Demands for Services
The need for medical services is a professional medical judgment concerning the number of medical services that ought to be consumed over a certain period of time for people to remain or become healthy. The demand for medical services arises out of people trying to satisfy their psychologically formulated wants. It is important to distinguish the needs and demands, and there are two reasons for that.
The first one is consumer ignorance; usually, people do not recognize symptoms of bad health until there is pain or blood. The second one is connected with people who care about their health too much and do not consider current standards of good health and the potential of medical technology appropriate. So, people from both groups influence the gap between needs and demands for services and make it crucial to differ them.
Health Program Theories and Their Differences
One component of the effect theory is the theory of the causal or determinant forces that is an explanation of the process that currently lies in the health problem. According to Issel and Wells (2018), it “includes statements or hypotheses that describe which causal factors, including key relevant social ecological determinants, are directly responsible for the health problem” (p. 135). For instance, to develop a causal theory, it is possible to use a community diagnosis associated with gunshot deaths.
The determinant theory suggests that mortality from gunshot wounds is due to causal factors in the activities of local gangs, lack of conflict resolution skills, dropping out of school, and the availability of weapons (Issel & Wells, 2018). The factors that determine whether the causal ones actually lead to death are the adequacy of policing, the quality of emergency medical care, and individual resilience.
The theory of intervention mechanisms explains how interventions affect causal, determinant, moderating, and mediating factors, and this is the difference from the causal theory. What is more, this theory explains how the intervention changes the causal factors or breaks the connection between them and the health outcome and includes statements that describe the relationships between possible outcomes and interventions. Also, this theory formulates all the connections between the programmatic intervention and the intended effects on the health problem. It is useful to develop the intervention theory to refine the quality, types, and the number of interventions that are part of the health program.
The third theory is the impact one; it shows how the outcomes lead to impacts, so the main difference is that this theory concentrates on the results. It is usual that there is a rather limited number of health outcomes that a health program wants to affect. The impact theory helps to justify those claims of program planners about the effects of their program that sometimes seem to be wild by specifying the connection and relationships between the program’s immediate outcome and the ultimate, long-term changes of the health problem (Issel & Wells, 2018). Funding companies and agencies usually specify the impacts of their program.
Conclusion
To draw the conclusion, it is essential to say about the importance of distinguishing between demands and needs for services and seeing the differences between the causal, intervention, and impact theories. Knowing them, it may be easier to choose the right one while developing the health program. The casual theory describes the causal factors that are directly responsible for the health problem. The intervention theory explains how interventions may affect causal, determinant, moderating, and mediating factors. Finally, the impact theory shows the connections between the impacts and outcomes.
Reference
Issel, M., & Wells, R. (2018). Health program planning and evaluation: A practical, systematic approach for community health. (4th ed.). Houston, TX: Jones & Bartlett Learning.