Behavioral Interventions

Interventions that has to do with behavior focuses on changing the way people behave when it comes to their health. 

A particular medicine, procedure, or equipment is typically tested in a clinical trial as the standard medical intervention. 

Throughout the experiment, doctors offer various services to various patients before assessing the results. 

A high emphasis is placed on ensuring sure that patients behave exactly as is expected of them; variation in patient behavior is often discouraged. 

In contrast, the focus of behavioral therapies is on changing the patient’s behavior. 

Behavioral interventions are essential when taking into account problems like the high rate of avoidable illness or racial inequities in health.

 Theory of Planned Behavior  

According to the theory, human behavior is guided by three factors: 

• Perceptions regarding the anticipated consequences of the behavior and assessments of these consequences (behavioral beliefs),
• Beliefs on others’ normative expectations and the desire to uphold these standards (normative beliefs); 
• Beliefs regarding the existence of elements that could help or hinder the performance of the behavior, as well as how powerful these elements are seen to be (control beliefs). 

Health Behavioral Interventions

Interventions that support and reward individuals for adopting healthy lifestyle habits and work to give people more control over their well-being and the factors that influence it. These include measures that address the information, obstacles, and enablers that can influence behavior.

Levels of Behavioral Interventions

Behavioral interventions can be implemented at 3 levels. 

• The individual level: 

These treatments encourage those who have a high risk of contracting a specific disease to take action. Programs to help smokers quit, hypertensive patients take their prescriptions, or diabetics exercise are a few examples.

These actions include dietary and exercise adjustments as well as medical ones (regular testing of blood pressure and cholesterol).

But in both situations, the person is in charge of the activities that are taken.

Several people saw the relative failure of individual efforts as proof of the significance of environmental influences in health. Since people are products of their environments, it is impossible to alter an individual without altering the society in which that person lives. Due to this, a second sort of intervention—community intervention—was developed.

• The Community intervention:

designed to alter the conditions that encourage certain actions. In the 1980s, a number of community-based treatments with a renewed emphasis on cardiovascular disease were put into place.

To spread messages promoting healthy behavior, these programs made use of the media, population screening, and community organizations.

• The National Intervention:

The national level is the third stage of health intervention. 

People are frequently given health information by the federal government or by private organizations with the intention of promoting behavioral change. 

These national interventions have a significantly better track record of success than community interventions, at least in some instances. 

Numerous nations have seen sustained decreases in the consumption of red meat, eggs, and high-fat dairy products as a result of national information campaigns about the risks of high cholesterol. 

Each of these actions responds well to treatment.

Categories of behavioral interventions

By lowering problematic behavior in patients, behavior therapies aim to promote accomplishment. 

This item discusses strategies designed to lessen a range of unhealthy behaviors, including low-intensity disturbance, hostility, violence, carelessness, substance misuse, and generally unhealthful behaviors.

The interventions themselves can be divided into three categories:

1. Approaches to developing a positive behaviors or improving discipline across sick individuals which also aim to support greater improvement in health conditions;
2. Universal programs which seek to improve behavior and generally take place in the hospitals; and
3. More specialized programs which are targeted at patients with specific behavioral issues.

Only therapies that explicitly address behavior are connected with reported changes in patients’ health or discipline, such as parental involvement and social and emotional development programs.

Some targeted risk factors that requires behavioral Interventions includes:

• Tobacco Use and Exposure: Intervention aims to lessen or eliminate tobacco usage or exposure to secondhand smoke.
• Physical inactivity: The goal of the intervention is to increase physical activity (including interventions that reduce screen time and sedentary activities).
• Poor Diet: Diet is improved by intervention.
• High Cholesterol: Intervention aims to prevent high cholesterol or enhance its management.
• High Blood Pressure: Intervention aims to prevent high blood pressure or enhance its treatment.
• Diabetes: Intervention aims to better control type 2 diabetes or to prevent its onset.
• Obesity: An intervention aims to prevent or lessen obesity.

How effective is behavioral interventions’ approach

During the course of a year, behavior interventions often result in four extra months of improvement. Research has suggested that, on average, behavior interventions can result in a decline in behavioral issues and a moderate improvement in achieving good health. Yet, estimates of benefits differ greatly amongst initiatives.

Conclusion

Understanding that the issue behaviors are a way of communicating and responding sympathetically are the objectives of intervention efforts. Patients, patients’ relatives, physicians, and behavior analysts build trust in one another as a result, and the focus switches from fixing students to understanding them.

References

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK25527/#:~:text=Behavioral%20interventions%20are%20interventions%20designed,drug%2C%20surgery%2C%20or%20device.

https://www.cdc.gov/chinav/resources/glossary/index.html#:~:text=Health%20Behaviors%3A%20Interventions%20that%20promote,facilitators%20that%20can%20affect%20behavior.

https://online.regiscollege.edu/blog/behavior-intervention-definition-strategies/

https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/behavioral-interventions