The concepts of health and the role of the NHS in keeping people Essay

The concepts of health and the role of the NHS in keeping people healthy - Essay Example NHS has played a major role in keeping people of UK healthy and continues to do so. In this essay, the role of NHS in the health of people of UK will be discussed with reference to various concepts, determinants and models of health and through a suitable example. Concepts of Health During its creation, the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1948 defined health as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." Critics argued the completeness of this definition and in 1986, in the Ottawa Charter for health Promotion, the WHO modified the definition of health and defined it as "a resource for everyday life, not the objective of living. Health is a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources, as well as physical capacities." Even this definition has not been accepted completely and thus several models of health have come up in an aim to provide complete definition of health. Examples of models of health ar e the biomedical model, biopsychosocial model and public health model. Biomedical model is a very primitive model of health and is considered as the most traditional model of health and illness. ... According to the biopsychosocial model, illness is caused due to an interplay of a multitude of factors and that most of the times illness results from an interplay of biological factors like pathogens, psychological factors like beliefs and behaviors and social factors like economic status and employment. This model of health was developed by Engel in the 1970s. The psycho aspects of health which this model proposed were cognitions like expectations of health, certain emotions like fear of treatment and important health-related behaviors like consumption of alcohol, smoking, diet and exercise (Curtis, 2000). Emotional turmoil, lack of self-control and negative thinking have been incriminated in the development of disease. The social aspects of health which this model proposed were social drinking, peer group pressure and expectations, social values of health, ethnicity, parental pressure and expectations and social class. The biopsychosocial model of health is basically based on the social cognitive theory (Curtis, 2000). While the Medical model stresses on the treatment of the individual with the problem, the Public Health model emphasizes interventions in target populations (Taylor et al, 1999). There are 3 types of interventions according to this model. 1. Primary prevention: efforts to reduce the incidence of the problem before it occurs in the population. The nurse or any other public health personnel shall visit the families at home for intervention. 2. Secondary prevention: The public health personnel start interfering during the early stages of domestic violence or at just the suspicion of it. 3. Tertiary prevention: The public health personnel get involved once there is definite evidence of