Please post to the forum by 1pm on the day of class
1. State your health outcome of interest. (It could be the one you used for week #2 or another one.) Pick two key behaviors that are important factors leading to your health outcome. Explain the importance of these behaviors either for etiology, prevention, or intervention. (If none of the behaviors in the readings are important for your health outcome, suggest another behavior that is.)
The health outcome of interest in my research is propofol administration. As this is less patient-directed and more clinician- and provider-directed, I will focus on a secondary health outcome of interest: duration of mechanical ventilation. Although there are many acute contributions to a patient’s need for mechanical ventilation, health maintenance and the patient’s baseline state of health factor into this. Key behaviors associated with health maintenance include medication adherence and health care utilization. Medication adherence reflects the ability to have access to and regularly take prescribed medications that would, one hopes, confer a certain degree of health, preventing comorbidities from the disease(s) being treated. Health care utilization also reflects the ability to have access to providers in a timely fashion allowing recognition of illness before it becomes significantly worse.
2. Describe how you would study the role of one of the behaviors described for question #1 and your health outcome of interest. Incorporate a social factor (e.g. race/ethnicity, social exclusion, stress) in the study approach.
Although both behaviors are difficult to study, I may be able to take a more population-level approach to answering health care utilization. It would combine data from areas such as insurance status, zip-code level poverty data, and whether or not one has a primary-care provider listed. There are additional factors, however, that are less easily obtained but important: access to transportation, employment status and schedule, caregiver status, race/ethnicity, and also attitudes toward health care and healthcare utilization. All of these answers would be more easily obtained through detailed surveys and interviews (unfortunately, none of which is currently part of my study design due to the nature of secondary data analysis-based research).
3. If key health behaviors (e.g. smoking, exercise, nutritious diet) are strongly influenced by neighborhood, income, and/or education, do we need to continue to study how these behaviors influence health outcomes? Why or why not?
I believe it is important to continue to study key health behaviors such as those listed. It is important to understand the intersections of these behaviors and to understand how some of the environments and structures in which people live, as well as their socioeconomic status and position influence and contribute to the behaviors. None of the work can be done in isolation. As each element influences the other, we can better understand the relationships and as a result what we can do to make effective change.