Selected Family Health Promotion Assessment and Initiative Essay - 1

Selected Family Health Promotion Assessment and Initiative - Essay Example In most first world countries, health visitors offer spontaneous public health service in accordance to the actions taken by the government to promote health and provide preventive care among families and communities. These health visitors maintain a number of cases to be dealt with, particularly families within a certain area with children of 5 years old and below, to supply health services through specialized home visiting that focuses on individual health care needs, clinic contacts, as well as health-related activities at a community level. Since the early 1990s, the British National Health Service has aimed to implement policies that will address health inequalities (Greater London Authority 2002), reduce all health-related gaps, and improve the living standards of those experiencing the worst health conditions in the society (Department of Health 2001). Initially, the pressure in decreasing the amount of time allocated for home visiting was consequently followed by the increase d emphasis on disadvantaged families. Owing to such priorities, major decisions were made with regards to the assessment of health needs when families are first visited by health visitors to identify the appropriate frequency of possible contacts in the future. There is not a single approach that is accepted as the sole tool for assessing health needs; there is also no established agreements regarding the applicability of various approaches with which decisions about the frequency, level, and types of services to be provided are to be made. Elkan, Robinson, Williams, and Blair (2001) asserted that the main decision lies on the judgment of health professionals in ascertaining the frequency of communication and contact with families. There have been an increased number of studies that examine the processes integrated within health visitor needs assessment, especially in settling on the necessary contact frequency between the family and health visitor (Appleton 2002); however, there ar e fewer studies that highlight the structure the implementation of structured health needs assessment approaches. Nonetheless, majority of health institutions responsible for health visitors have implemented a type of structured guidance that can help make appropriate decisions about service provision in health visiting. The current study, then, focuses on the Developmental Model of Health and Nursing (DMHN) which emphasizes the development of healthy attitudes and behaviors that take place in the family. The DMHN generally pays attention to how family members create the strategies necessary for them to live a healthy life, focusing on the role of the entire family in developing the responses to health-related situations which can generally affect the family at an individual and group level (Ford-Gilboe 2002).Due to the model’s strengths-based direction, the DMHN can be very much applicable for evaluating and gaining insight especially about vulnerable groups of people. The f ollowing sections will then examine the application of the Developmental Model of Health and Nursing (DMHN) initially proposed by Alen (1977) to restructure health care systems and make them