The Hardest of Changing People’s Health Behaviour

Every year, a significant number of projects are being planned and executed by profit and non-profit organizations towards addressing one public or personal health challenge or another throughout the world. In most cases, these organisations paid attention to knowledge, attitudes and people’s health practices, spending huge amounts of money on correcting their unhealthy behaviour. Despite various interventions at the local, national, regional, and global levels, diseases of various types continue to spread in varying proportions. For example, despite numerous strategic marketing and health promotion campaigns, mental health disorders have remained one of the most prevalent diseases worldwide since 100 BC.

Making people adhere to medication, decrease risky sexual activity and promote physical activity, for example, has been difficult for health professionals over the years. This is most noticeable in developing countries, and it is driving up the demand for health practitioners to acquire critical behavior change skills and knowledge. In the previous analysis, our analyst examined strategic notes that health professionals and their allied experts could consider for health promotion. In the current piece, our analyst takes a look at the role of the total process planning model for initiating and executing efforts to change people’s uptake of the right health behaviours.

Project management is crucial in the promotion of health and in social marketing for health. As there are issues to be managed, there are methods for managing projects. Typically, important steps include pre-planning, situation assessment, identification of goals, audiences, and objectives, identification of strategies, activities, and resources, development of indicators, and review of programme plans. At the pre-planning stage, data gathering and interpretation, assurance of participation of stakeholders, time allotment, provision of money and other resources and decision making are prioritized.

The five stages of the Total Process Planning model are scope, develop, implement, evaluate, and follow-up.  The problem is stated, important stakeholders are involved, potential audiences are identified, and the scope includes some initial behavioral goals. Additionally, concepts that will help the audience reach the highest level of behavior change are developed. The campaign proposition is tested in the second stage by examining the social marketing mix, the barriers to change, finding incentives or rewards, segmenting the target audience, and then fine-tuning goals and objectives. Indicators of success are still chosen during this phase, and campaign elements are pre-tested, improved, and adjusted. The intervention is launched during the third stage of implementation. Impact measurement takes place during the evaluation phase. Since being proactive is essential for success, this stage (monitoring and evaluation) lasts from the start of the project to its conclusion. The final stage is follow-up, which encourages a transition from short-term to medium- and long-term impacts as a result of evaluation’s key actions.