Week 19: What is health?

Health psychology is a study of how people interpret health and why they undertake certain actions in response. We looked at the definition of health and discovered that contrary to common understanding, health is more than just physical but also concerns the mental, social and spiritual well-being of an individual. This underpins my initial interest in taking this module: I have always wanted to know how patients interpret their health and why do some individuals still undertake activities that are known to be harmful to their health despite years of education? 

Now I understand the idea of health is a personal and subjective concept that is influenced by upbringing, education and personal experience with diseases. I am aiming to be more empathetic towards health behaviours conducted by my future patients and adapt my communication to support them whilst respecting to their perception of health. I will make sure from the very beginning of any consultations that I inform the patients that they have a right in choosing whether they would like to treat and how they would like to treat.

From Andrew*’s talk, I can also see the impact of a community pharmacist can bring to patient’s health since pharmacists are the healthcare professionals that patients see the most on a regular basis without appointments. I am planning to keep up with the media in reporting health-related news e.g. by reading the Daily Mail and BBC and reflect on how I should communicate this to my future patients. I have already started practising this as some individuals of my church congregation asked my opinion on a health news article. I had to explain to them in lay person terms but I am still adapting my language to be more patient-friendly with minimal jargons. Perhaps to a wider audience I am looking at promoting public health intervention such as Antibiotic Guardian in social networks (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) for my pharmacy chain as pre-registration pharmacist and even beyond!

[* Andrew is one of our expert patients who conducted a pilot Skype interview session with us in the first lecture.]