Locally we rarely do market research. One survey we do perform is the Community Health Assessment, but only every 4 years. I have recently come to view the community health assessments as looking at what health status people have purchased.Exactly. What purchasing choices are being made by individuals and by the community? That's a different question than the ones that typically get asked for a health assessment.
Could we instead ask WHY they have made that “purchase”/ lifestyle behavior, or even WHAT would make our public health option “sexier” for them to want to purchase it? For example, instead of asking “have you been diagnosed with diabetes?” could we ask “what stops you from testing your blood sugar every day?”? “How would you like to be physically active?” “What prevents you from doing that?” “What would it take to get you to eat 5 fruits and vegetable servings a day?”
Those are great questions-- and leadership is about asking the right questions.
I'm reading a book called Nudge, by Thaler and Sunstein-- it is about "choice architecture," about the way that policy-makers can "nudge" people to make appropriate choices (and still give people the freedom of options). As Shirin says, maybe that means making the healthy option "sexier," or maybe it means doing the research to find out what choices people are likely to make in certain situations and then adjusting the choice architecture to insure that most people are going to make the best choice for their health.
--Steve Orton
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I recently read Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein. I love the idea of applying the theory of Nudge to public health. Nudging is about changing people’s behavior in a predictable way without hindering their ability to choose.
For example, placing fruit at eye level is a nudge to increase healthy eating; mandating that junk food be banned is not a nudge.
Nudge has a few chapters related to health: Medicare Part D, Organ Donations and Environmental issues. The chapter on organ donation is interesting in that it applies the nudge idea to several methods to increase the rate of organ donation. The authors focus on explicit consent, routine removal and presumed consent.
Maybe public health should be viewed more from the aspect of how we can ‘nudge’ individuals to make the right health choices – avoiding tobacco products while pregnant, practicing safe sex, eating healthier foods, getting regular check-ups.
Any ideas as to how can we ‘nudge’ the public to make better choices yet still motivate them and encourage their individuality?
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