Disparities Between Health Promotion And Health Education

Healthy communities are constantly changing and important as people interact with their life and environments to enhance health capacity. In community, health promotion and health education are quite essential for individuals and groups in understanding personal and psychological factors that can affect personal choices (McMurray & Clenden, 2015, p. 41). This can support social and cultural factors in developing their life and accessing their needs. This essay will discuss the disparities between health promotion and health education in various parts, such as the aim, the function and the expectation. It will outline influences on successful delivery of health education in a primary health care context in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
To begin with,

Firstly, the aim of health promotion in primary health care (PHC) is basically to focus on preventative healthcare from a variety of harmful causes and determinants of illnesses and to improve health (McMurray & Clenden, 2015, p. 30). It is clear that health promotion can build strengths, competencies, and resources for positive health (Leddy, 2006, p. 3). This can help people to have healthy lifestyles in physical, social and cultural environments. In contrast, the purpose of health education is different from health promotion. This is mainly to provide helpful information to obtain health knowledge for people, including health issues, and they can use this knowledge for self-management (McMurray & Clenden, 2015, p. 40). Moreover, health education is consisted as one aspect of health promotion. It can assist people to improve health literacy which is the capacity of individuals to acquire and to understand fundamental health information and services for enhancing their health habits. This can help to identify their strengths, weaknesses and inequities of community life regarding health. Secondly, the function of health promotion and health education is different. A main function of health promotion is to establish mutually interdependent relationships with individuals, communities and organizations in health (Sharma & Romas, 2008, p. 26). This can make health policies or strategies for equity of

PHC provides wide health services such as diagnosis and treatment, health education and prevention through advertisement, written or visual resources (Ministry of Health, 2017d, para. 1). Health education is a kind of performance to carry out such a thing as a counseling session with a group of people by using diverse methods (Sharma & Romas, 2008, p. 7). Health education may have positive and negative effects for personal health. Firstly, adolescent health is important as it can influence their quality of life and it can establish educational backgrounds for health. In New Zealand, obesity in childhood rapidly increases and one of the highest rate in the world (McMurray & Clenden, 2015, p. 260, ; Teevale & Kaholokula, 2018, p. 7). Teevale and Kaholokura (2018, p. 9) explain that obesity in childhood is related to nutritional and physical activity practices of parents. In fact, New Zealand has offered the B4 School Check program in 2017. Health professional supports children and their parents to have opportunities for obtaining knowledge of healthy lifestyle (Ministry of Health, 2016b, para. 1). In addition, educators can encourage parents and schools to manage regular diets or follow nutritional guidelines, and students can build positive role models in achieving their ideal self so that they can have educational backgrounds about healthy life. This is