HEALTH PROMOTION PROJECT

Promoting Wellness through Physiotherapy

Promoting Wellness through Physiotherapy

Background

Since last decade, teenage smoking has become a growing concern of the UK health interventionists and policy makers (Cancer Research UK, 2012, p. n.d.). Smoking is a silent killer that has caused countless deaths and mourning health condition of the UK's future leaders. For sure, it is a health issue that needs to be well addressed by raising awareness and health promotional activities that may gauge behavioural change among the target audience. The reason to select teenage smoking as a prime health issue in the UK is the unexpected increase in the number of teenage smokers over the past few decades (figure 1) (ASH, 2013, p. 1).

Figure 1: Percentage Categorization of England Regular Smokers by Sex (Age Group: 11-15) (ASH, 2013, p. 1)

According to ASH fact sheet (2013, p. 1), prevalence of regular smoking is more likely to increase with the age. In 2011, number of regular child smokers with the age bracket of 11-15 grew to 140, 000 relative to 10, 000 regular child smokers in 2010 (ASH, 2013, p. 1). The research has indentified varied factors associated with teenage smoking such as socio-economic status, parental smoking, influence form TV advertisement and film depiction of smoking. Typically, prevalence of family smoking initiates the chain of teenage smoking that may end up with chronic diseases and eventual death (ASH, 2013, p. 1).

Figure 2: Percentage of Regular Child Smokers at the age of 15 (ASH, 2013, p. 2)

Teenage smoking is a recent health issue that needs endorsements of behavioural change activities and health promotional programs at a large scale (Fuller, 2012, p. 25). To state the fact, there are several initiatives taken at a local and national level in order to promote youth health awareness and anti-smoking activities such as community based interventions, smoking policies at school level and school based education. The project will supplement these services by improving existing health interventions via incorporation of effective activities of behavioural change at local, community and individual level. The project will propose a behavioural change intervention, which will comprise of the following activities:

Use of social media to raise awareness

Organize programs and healthy activities at school and community level

Short Physiotherapists activities

Motivational interview

Provide follow-up support

Assess behavioural progress

Measure effectiveness of the project



Evaluation of the Literature

According to CDC (n.d., p. 1), children between the age bracket of 15-19 years are identified at the teenage stage of child development process. It is the stage, when a child undergoes numerous kinds of new learning experiences and physical changes, which if not well addressed may result in stress, depression and other complications leading to ineffective psychological development. It is a demographic group that Teenagers are more vulnerable to socio-economic, cultural and environmental factors that may have direct or indirect effect on his physical and psychological development (CDC, n.d., p. 2).

The project has selected teenagers as the target group of the intended behavioural change interventions due to their high exposure to tobacco advertisements and socio-economic factors (Canadian Lung Association, 2012, ...