Building Health Public Policies

The Ottawa Charter can be defined as the global health milestone that acts as the vital reference for health promotion. The Charter is seen to identify five important components of health promotion actions and different prerequisites for health along with the determination of three basic strategies that guide the health promotion initiatives (Deehan & Wylie, 2016). These basic strategies for health promotion are seen to include effective advocacy for health, enabling people for achieving their fullest proposal and mediating and coordinating actions among all relevant stakeholders.    

The Ottawa charter mainly covers five important priority actions that had been followed appropriately while developing the health promotion project for the Maori community to reduce the prevalence of occurrence of lung cancer by cessation of smoking habits. The assignment will focus how the action areas ad been achieved successfully. It will also discuss whether six principles of Te Pae M?hutonga framework in public health had been also achieved or not in the previous assignment.

Health public policy merges diverse and complementary approaches for health promotion. The policies are developed by keeping health issue as the major agenda among policy makers in all areas as well as in all levels. The policies are seen to include legislations, fiscal measures, taxation as well as organizational changes (Naidoo & Wilis, 20160. This criterion successfully involves effective identification of the impediments for adoption of the healthy public policies and proper identification of the ways of removing the obstacles.

Every of the above-mentioned requirements had been covered in the presentation successfully. The paper had talked about the advocating of the issues of high level of smoking among people in the Maori community to the local government. Accordingly, effective policies can be developed and published for their betterment. Policies that promote establishment of legislation to increase the tobacco tax in the presentation are indeed one of the best initiatives. This can be one of the effective ways of inhibiting community people from buying cigarettes and this would have positive outcome on their health (Lake & Rhynders, 2018). Reducing the subsidies for the cessation pharmacotherapy in the policies would make the sessions more affordable for the low-income Maori community people. This would make the community seek such services in higher number and hence prevalence of the disorder of lung cancer would be reduced.

Studies are of the opinion that there exists an inextricable link between health of human beings and that of the environment. The ways society manages the environment can help in creation of the better health of the people. Researchers are of the opinion that as health cannot be separated from the environmental factors, protection and maintenance of both natural and built environment along with the preservation of the natural resources is extremely important for health promotion (Stahl, 2018). Therefore, reciprocal maintenance of the environment is the major guiding principle for developing health of a particular community.

Creation of the Supportive Environment

The presentation has been rightly made with the initiatives that help in developing an environment that prevent smoking tendencies among the Maori people in the community. When the built-in environment will inhibit selling of cigarettes, the tendencies of the people of the community to buy cigarettes will inevitably reduce. When smoking would be banned in the environment, this will force the people of the community to stop smoking forcibly. Along with it, developing a smoke free environment in workplaces, schools and hospitals would also prevent people from developing the urge to smoke and will reduce passive smoking by non-smokers. Therefore, these initiatives are appropriate as they relate with modifying the environment of the community to support reduction of smoking habits voluntarily or involuntarily.

Present day researchers are of the opinion that communities are the best areas where health promotion can bring out maximum health outcomes. Studies are of the opinion that health promotion can work through effective community actions by setting of different priorities and making decisions, planning and even implementing actions (Fry & Zask, 2016). The initiatives should have the core idea that would entail empowerment of the communities through community involvement, participation and effective engagement in matters of health. Flexible systems are developed in communities for strengthening public participation.

 People within a community will only try to modify their health habits when they understand the importance of modifying their risky behaviors. In order to make the Maori people in the community develop awareness against negative outcomes of smoking and modify their lifestyles, they need to fist develop their health literacy and knowledge. To make the community empowered enough to take successful lifestyle changes, awareness programs would be developed with health education sessions (Lee, 2015). This would make them know the real risk factors of lung cancer and negative outcomes of smoking. This will make them participate effectively in health promotion program. They will participate and act in collaboration with government and health promoters to make their community a better place to live in. Hence, the initiatives taken to make Maori community develop health education along with providing them with support for culturally related cessation programs would encourage their participation of target group. 

Health promotion programs need to support social and personal development by providing information, education and enhancement of life skills. The initiatives should be such that it would enable individual people for learning to prepare themselves for coping with health events. Studies are of the opinion that developing personal skills would prepare and increase the chances of an individual for controlling their own health through their own initiatives (Thompson et al., 2018).

Strengthening of the Community Actions

Often it might happen that particular individuals in the community have developed knowledge about the negative aspects of smoking. However, they are not getting enough motivation and dedication to overcome their tendencies and urge to stop smoking. Therefore, in such areas motivational counseling or counseling the clients to cope with the withdrawal symptoms effectively can help in success of the health promotion initiatives. Hence, the presentation had correctly identified the needs of counseling sessions and had clearly included in the program initiatives in the section.

This step mainly includes reorienting the healthcare services by shifting towards a system that focuses on health promotion rather than curative aspects. The services need to be interlinked and connected with physical, social, political and economic environments. It should be focusing on the needs, demands of the people from the healthcare units, and accordingly modify the infrastructure as required.

The Maori people often avoid the healthcare systems with the fear of not being treated with cultural competency. They fear that the professionals would not care for their cultural pereferces, traditions and inhibitions. Therefore, they avoid taking their services. Therefore, the presentation rightly states the importance of training and education of the healthcare professionals to develop their cultural competency (Waitoki et al., 2015). When the professionals would start treating Maori people in a culturally competent manner, the Maori community would seek for their services and this would reduce prevalence rate. Moreover, the presentation also promoted educating the the Maori women with Maori support workers and health providers regarding the side effects of smoking and importance of healthy life style. This had induced preventative services and discouraged curative services successfully.

Community and Public health system of the Maori government utilizes the Te Pae M?hutonga framework. This help the healthcare promoters to include all the essential aspects of health promotion and protection that align with the culture and traditions of the Maori community.

This principle states that the health promotion initiatives should be such that it allows the Maori people to enjoy their real identities by having access to their language, economic and social resources, knowledge, and culture and to societal domains (Warbick et al., 2016). The initiatives have clearly mentioned that the various counseling sessions and psychotherapy sessions that would be developed would align with their cultural aspects. Hence, this criterion had been maintained.

Ng? Manukura: Leadership:

This principles state the importance of presence of community role models and among peer groups to participate as leaders in community plan development. Communication, collaboration and alliances between groups and social leaders in the community is important. This criterion is not mentioned in the presentation and no such initiatives to include leaders from Moari community are also promoted.

Developing Personal Skills

Communities should be able to demonstrate self-determination and autonomy in promotion of their well being and health (Te-Moranga et al., 2018). This criteria is clearly followed as the presentation states the importance of empowering the communities so that they feel included in decisions making and also develop their awareness to make correct lifestyle decisions

Te Oranga: Participation in society:

This principle states that health cannot be separated from society. This principle is because health is being impacted by the extent to which people are able to participate and feel as the part of the society (Verbeist et al., 2018). That criterion is maintained in the presentation as the presentation had indeed provided initiatives for community participation and strengthening of communities. Working in conjugation with the Tu Katahi Maori for promoting awareness program is a proof of this.

This principle is mainly concerned with the personal behavior and the type of lifestyle individuals choose to live. It states the importance of impact of lifestyle on health and well-being. The initiatives that had been proposed help in development of health literacy of Maori people that would help them to modify their lifestyle and overcome negative habits like smoking. Individual counseling sessions were also proposed that would influence lifestyle management and effective coping of the Maori people. Hence, this principle has been fulfilled.

Waiora: Environmental protection:

This principle states the importance of connection between people and the environment. The latter is essential for cultural well being for many people as it provides a sense of place (Verbeist et al., 2018). Although environment modification is talked about in the assignment, no initiatives had been taken to modify the environment from the cultural perspective that Maori people pits much significance to. Hence, this is not covered in presentation.

Conclusion:

The detailed discussion shows that all the action areas of the Ottawa charter had been fulfilled successfully. However, in case of Te Pae M?hutonga framework in public health, four principles had been successfully achieved and two principles had not been covered in the presentation.

References:

Deehan, A., & Wylie, A. (2016). Health Promotion: the challenges, the questions of definition, discipline status and evidence base. Health Promotion in Medical Education: From Rhetoric to Action, 10.

Fry, D., & Zask, A. (2016). Applying the Ottawa Charter to inform health promotion programme design. Health promotion international, 32(5), 901-912.

Lake, D. M., & Rhynders, P. (2018). Preliminary evaluation of an adolescent positive health measurement scale: a salutogenic health promotion approach. Global health promotion, 1757975918757703.

Lee, M. S. (2015). The principles and values of health promotion: building upon the Ottawa charter and related WHO documents. Korean Journal of Health Education and Promotion, 32(4), 1-11.

Naidoo, J., & Wills, J. (2016). Foundations for Health Promotion-E-Book. Elsevier Health Sciences.

Ståhl, T. (2018). Health in All Policies: From rhetoric to implementation and evaluation–the Finnish experience. Scandinavian journal of public health, 46(20_suppl), 38-46.

Te Morenga, L., Pekepo, C., Corrigan, C., Matoe, L., Mules, R., Goodwin, D., … & Jull, A. (2018). Co-designing an mHealth tool in the New Zealand M?ori community with a “Kaupapa M?ori” approach. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 14(1), 90-99.

Thompson, S. R., Watson, M. C., & Tilford, S. (2018). The Ottawa Charter 30 years on: still an important standard for health promotion. International Journal of Health Promotion and Education, 56(2), 73-84.

Verbiest, M. E., Corrigan, C., Dalhousie, S., Firestone, R., Funaki, T., Goodwin, D., … & Vano, M. (2018). Using codesign to develop a culturally tailored, behavior change mHealth intervention for indigenous and other priority communities: A case study in New Zealand. Translational behavioral medicine.

Verbiest, M., Borrell, S., Dalhousie, S., Tupa’i-Firestone, R., Funaki, T., Goodwin, D., … & Jiang, Y. (2018). A Co-Designed, Culturally-Tailored mHealth Tool to Support Healthy Lifestyles in M?ori and Pasifika Communities in New Zealand: Protocol for a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial. JMIR research protocols, 7(8).

Waitoki, W., Nikora, L. W., Harris, P. E. T. K., & Levy, M. P. (2015). Reconnecting wh?nau: Pathways to recovery for M?ori with bipolar disorder. In International Indigenous Development Research Conference 2014 (pp. 147-154). Ng? Pae o te M?ramatanga.

Warbrick, I., Dickson, A., Prince, R., & Heke, I. (2016). The biopolitics of M?ori biomass: towards a new epistemology for M?ori health in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Critical Public Health, 26(4), 394-404.