Promotion of Positive Health Behaviors

¶ … Program to Promote Positive Health Behaviors

The screening practice for disease has been identified as an effective tool to save lives, reduce suffering and reduce health care costs. While a periodic screening for cervical and breast cancer has been identified as an effective tool in reducing a level of burden of disease in women, however, many screening practices fall short of a recommended practice thereby leaving patients to face unnecessary risks. Barriers to cancer screening exist at different levels at physician, patients and practice systems. The EWM (Every Woman Matter) is a state-organized program and federally-funded program to eliminate barriers to prevent cervical and breast cancer screening. The program focuses on raising public awareness on the risks associated to breast cancer and make the screening more accessible to all low-income women. The goal of the program is also to allow eligible women to receive a Papanicolaou smear test, mammography, and clinical breast examination at reduce costs.

Although, the EMW program intends to deliver health service for women, however, the level of cervical and breast cancer screening still fall short of the ideal. Numerous attempts to enhance a preventive service delivery deliver no magic bullet to change practice and physician behaviors.

Objective of this paper is to investigate the reason the Every Woman Matter was not effective. The paper also identifies two successful programs for the cancer screening and characteristics that made the programs effective.

Reasons the EMW Program had not met its Goals

Different factors have prevented the EMW not being able to meet their goals. The financial reason is one of the major factors that makes the program not be able to realize its goals. Typically, the program targets women with low incomes, and by consequence, these group of women are unable to afford the high costs of regular medical checkups. Moreover, millions of low income women do not have health insurance to assist them paying for the breast cancer screening despite that the program aims to offer the low cost of cancers screening.

Although, the EWM program aims to enhance preventive disease among women to avert serious health problem, nevertheless, women health conditions could only be treated if the disease are detected earlier enough. The costs of screening the breast cancer have prevented many low income women from carrying out the screening until the disease have been developed in the woman body. In the United States, people who lack the health insurance face the risks of developing chronic disease because they will not be able to afford a regular medical checkup.

"Health insurance status is a critical factor in determining access to care and health outcomes for women with breast cancer. Women without health insurance are less likely to receive mammogram screening services compared to those who are insured." (Vann, & Julie, 2011 p 97).

While the EWM attempted to bridge the gap by taking preventive health measures for low income women, nevertheless, the program is unable to meet its goals since it records no objective feedback from the program's support staff. Without feedback from the program support staff, it will be challenging to identify the problems associated with its implementation, and address the shortcomings. Backer, Geske, McIlvain et al. (2005) point out that many physicians in the rural hospitals were less enthusiastic about the program and without the support of physicians for a health promotion program, a program may not effectively improved.

Lack of financial and human resources for its implementation is another problem that hinders an effective implementation of the EMW. (Shi, & Singh, 2010). Typically, an effective implementation of a program requires an integration of human and financial resources. The EMW fails to raise adequate human and financial resources for the implementation since it focuses only on low-income women. Additionally, the program stakeholders were unable to raise adequate funding from the state and federal authorities. Thus, the inadequate resources associated with the program leads to logistic complications during the program's implementation. More importantly, the EMW lacks sufficient flexibility to deal with numerous changes associated to the program. Ineffective leaderships styles have also been associated to the program's failures.

Summary of the Features of two Successful Prevention Programs

The NBCCEDP "(National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program)" (Vann, & Julie, 2011 p 96) is one of the most successful health programs in the United States. The program covers people suffering from cervical or breast cancer. Moreover, the program covers people under 65 years of age, uninsured people as well as people not eligible for Medicaid. The characteristics of the NBCCEDP makes the program to be one of the most successful cancer prevention programs in the United States. Typically, the program is implemented in the entire country. Although, the program targets women, nevertheless, eligible men affected by the breast cancer can be covered. The program has been successful because it encompasses an excellent and effective leadership structures. (Vann, & Julie, 2011 p 96). Through effective leadership, the NBCCEDP stakeholders has been able to resolve problems associated to the program implementations. The program has also been successful because of resources allocations. The federal government provides financial supports for the program.

The NJCEED "(New Jersey Cancer Education and Early Detection)" (Lardiere, 2014 p 1) is also one of the successful health programs in the United States. The state of New Jersey is responsible for the program implementation with the goal of preventing cancer. The goal of the program is also to promote the management of cancer in New Jersey. The program has been successful because it only focuses on the resident of New Jersey making the program only focuses on manageable population. The implementation framework is another strategy that makes the program to be successful since the New Jersey government provides adequate financial resources to support the program.

Strategies to implement more Effective Prevention Program

The stakeholders of Every Woman Matter should design a strategy to collect the feedback of people regarding the program since the outcome of the feedbacks will assist in addressing the shortcomings associated to the program. Moreover, the Every Woman Matter needs to make the flow of communication to be very effective. The integration of new technological platform will assist in enhancing a flow of communication. Backer, Geske, McIlvain et al. (2005) argues that "the GAPS model can be used to develop a practice-based intervention to identify and reduce barriers to delivery of breast and cervical cancer screening services." (p 401). The GAPS model can assist the Every Woman Matter to enhance preventive care and achieve goalsetting.