Health Promotion Essay

2359 Words10 Pages

This assignment will be looking at the health promotion initiative ‘ASH Ireland’ which stands for Action on Smoking and Health. ASH Ireland is a fairly new health promotion initiative, set up in 1992 to help combat smoking among the Irish population. ASH Ireland is one of Irelands leading anti – tobacco advocacy organisations (ash.ie, 2013). According to the Journal.ie (2014) “almost one in three Irish women smoke”. With almost two and a half million women in the country this statistic is extraordinarily high. On the 14th of October 2014, the Minister for Finance announced an increase of 40c on cigarettes for the 2015 Budget. The World Health Organistaion perceives price as the most important way of encouraging smokers to stop smoking. The …show more content…

The Health Belief Model was developed to help explain why a person may take the recommended preventative health service or adopt a healthy behaviour. The Health Belief Model emphasises that tobacco and nicotine consumption is determined by an individual’s attitude towards smoking. Perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits, perceived barriers and self-efficacy are key components of the Health Belief Model. Perceived susceptibility refers to the person’s vulnerability to an illness caused by smoking. Perceived severity refers to the seriousness of the tobacco related disease. Perceived benefits refer to the benefits of taking action - the effectiveness and treatment cost, perceived barriers are the barriers a person may face when trying to quit smoking and self-efficacy, a person’s ability to terminate smoking for …show more content…

Eysenck (2004) uses an example to prove this. An individual who smokes daily wants to give up smoking. They have a positive attitude about terminating smoking. The subjective norm favours the intention to quit. According to the Theory of Reasoned Action, the smoker would stop smoking. However, in practice, many people who smoke feel that smoking is an addiction and is primarily out of their control, thus making it very hard to quit. Similarly, these smokers will have low perceived behavioural control and thus coming to the result that they will typically be unsuccessful in their attempt to quit smoking. Therefore the Theory of Reasoned Action works best when applied to behaviour that is under a person’s control (or so they