Health Belief Model Essay

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According to Jane Ogden, “Health behaviours are regarded as any behaviour that is related to the health status of the individual.” These behaviours can have either a negative or positive impact on health. Behaviours which may have a positive impact include: working out daily at the gym, having regular dental check-ups or having a breast ultrasound to make sure there are no lumps in the breasts. Negative behaviours which impact health include: eating high sodium foods, refusing to visit a physician when ill and drinking excessive amounts of alcohol. Prior to my readings on Heath Behaviours and Attitudes I never realised my husband I had negative behaviours which had the potential to impact our health outcomes. In this essay I will focus on these …show more content…

The model which I felt most applied to our situation was the Health Belief Model (HBM). HBM was developed by Rosenstock (1966) and further by Becker and colleagues throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s. The HBM was developed to help understand why people did not use preventative services offered by public health departments in the 1950’s. It theorises that people’s beliefs about whether or not they are at risk for a disease or health problem and their perceptions of the benefits of taking action to avoid it, influenced their readiness to take action. When I applied this theory to us I realized that neither I nor my husband thought we were at risk for any serious illness at any point. We felt there was really no benefit to be derived from going to the doctor if we were not seriously ill. We felt we would have wasted several hundred dollars for no reason when we were confident we could treat each other at home. Our cue to take action was severe pain in each case. I however agree with the criticisms of this model as it focuses several conscious steps an individual’s health behaviour may take. These include susceptibility to the illness, severity of the illness and costs of carrying out the behaviour along with other steps. However, neither my husband nor I was consciously practicing this behaviour. We were influenced by our social environment and I never realised how seriously this could impact our health outcomes. Pain in the stomach is almost always thought to be gas and not a potential sign of a heart attack. The mother of a close friend actually died of heart attack after drinking tea the entire day for what she actually thought was gas. The fact that an individual’s social environment has considerable impact on an individual’s is another criticism of HBM as it ignores this factor .HBM suggests that if an individual is at high risk for a

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