Reference no: EM133561990

Case Study

You are entering the final semester of your senior year of study with a major in public health education. The health education/promotion program at your university requires seniors in their last semester to intern a minimum of 25 hours per week at a state or nonprofit agency. For this capstone experience, you have been assigned to the mayor's office in a medium-size city near the campus. During an orientation on the first day, you overhear that one of the tasks you will be assigned will involve meeting with the leaders of several community groups with the goal of creating smoke-free public parks in the city. The smoke-free park concept represents one of the mayor's main objectives in her second term in office. You also hear that the mayor is excited to have a health education student intern because she greatly respects the skills that a health education specialist possesses. The second day you have the opportunity to meet with the mayor, and, in fact, she does introduce to you the idea of a smoke-free public park system. During this meeting you discover that she is quite knowledgeable about the negative health effects of second- and thirdhand smoke in part because her son, a lifetime nonsmoker who worked in a pub in town (smoking was allowed in pubs), died last year from lung cancer at the age of 36. At the close of the meeting, the mayor asks you to submit to her your philosophy of health education/ promotion so that she can see what approach you might take with the community groups. Using the model outlined in this chapter, write out your health education/promotion philosophy. Based on your philosophy statement and given the project that you will be assigned, is the mayor's office a good place for you to intern to hone your skills? Why or why not? At what level of prevention do you think it would be most difficult to change health behavior? Why? Provide an example.