A health educator is a trained professional who works with groups in community settings or with individuals to help them understand how to live a healthy lifestyle.
Part of the role is assessing the
needs within a community and developing programs to meet those needs, and then
educating that community on how to address unhealthy behaviors and lifestyle
choices, such as smoking and excessive alcohol consumption.
A Health Educator… is professionally prepared and
possesses knowledge and skills based upon theories and research to promote
health education behavior change in individuals and populations.
Health
Education draws from various sciences to promote health and prevent disease,
disability, and premature death. Health educators provide information on health
and health related issues.
They can assess health training needs and plan
health education programs. They may specialize according to specific health
concerns, illnesses, or work or training setting.
Health educators may work as
independent consultants or in health departments, community organizations,
businesses, hospitals, schools, or government agencies.
Health
Educators often:
· Design
and develop health education programs.
· Perform
health training needs assessments.
· Publish
health education materials, information papers, and grant proposals.
· Develop
health education curricula.
· Teach
health in public and private schools.
In this article, you learn more about what
a health educator does, the skills you need to be an effective health
professional, Functions of Health Educations (What Trained Health
Educators Do) and Job Opportunities and Career
Prospects for Health Education Graduates in Nigeria.
7 Basic Roles and Responsibilities of a Health Educator
The following are the core responsibilities of health educator as
laid out by the National Commission for Health Education Credentialing; health
educators have seven primary responsibilities.
Those are as follows:
1. Assess Needs, Resources,
and Capacity for Health Education/Promotion: When working to improve the health of a community, the first
step is to assess the health needs of that community.
You will look for areas where health is suffering due to a lack
of health knowledge and/or poor practices. Then, you will assess the
availability of resources with which to better educate the community.
Are there proven programs or methods that can help you? Once
you’ve made these assessments, the final step is to determine what modes of
communication will work best for your community.
For instance, if you’re dealing with a community where
illiteracy is an issue, you’ll need to communicate in ways that do not require
reading, such as by using visual aids.
2. Plan Health
Education/Promotion: Once you have identified the health needs of your community and
how best to communicate health knowledge, you have to put together a plan.
You’ll want to consider budgets, the attitudes of stakeholders, timelines,
government regulations, and overall feasibility. Your goal is to overcome
existing obstacles to reach as many people in your community as possible.
3. Implement Health
Education/Promotion: After putting in the work to develop a strong program, you can
then go out into your community and provide the education the community needs to
improve its overall health and address health-related needs of the community.
This phase can be highly rewarding as you will develop
practitioner skills by working with various populations and applying behavior
change principles. Monitoring program effectiveness and managing its execution
are required tools to implement a successful health promotion intervention
and/or program.
4. Conduct Evaluation and
Research Related to Health Education/Promotion: As a health educator, your
responsibilities extend beyond the implementation of a health education or
promotion program.
You must also be able to evaluate your program as well as any
other programs, projects, or policies you’re involved in. This means you must
understand proper evaluation methodology and have realistic, measurable
objectives.
You can use tests, surveys, observation, medical data, and other
facts and figures to conduct an evaluation. Once the evaluation is complete,
you are expected to share the results with the wider heath education and
promotion community to help improve future efforts.
5. Administer and Manage
Health Education/Promotion: If you’ve developed a health education or promotion program,
it’s likely you will be running that program. That’s why health educators must
be good managers, capable of performing administrative tasks, supervising
staff, and working with community stakeholders.
6. Serve as a Health
Education/Promotion Resource Person: As a health educator, you’re expected to make yourself available
to answer community health questions and help that community understand and
address health concerns.
As such, you need to know where to find accurate health
information, how to assess the appropriateness of that information for your
community, and how to successfully communicate that information.
7. Communicate, Promote, and
Advocate for Health, Health Education/Promotion, and the Profession: Not everyone understands the
importance of health educators or the role they can play in improving local,
national, and global health.
As a health educator, you have the responsibility to support and
promote the profession to others and to work with those in your profession to
maintain standards and achieve health education and promotion goals.
What skills do you need to be successful as a health educator?
Health educators hone a variety of skills
from interpersonal to organizational to technical. To land a health educator
job, work on gaining and improving the following skills and qualities:
· Communication (written and verbal)
· Problem-solving
· Critical thinking
· Cultural and diversity awareness
· Patience and empathy
· Public speaking
· Teaching
· Time management
· Organization and prioritization
· Computer skills (internet, database, and
relevant software)
· Leadership
· Understanding cultural diversity
· Ability to speak an additional
language
Functions of Health Educations (What Trained Health Educators Do)
Health
educators teach people about behaviors that promote wellness. They are change
agents (positive behavior change)
They
also:
1. Teach
health education in schools
2. Assess
individual and community needs
3. Plan
health education programs
4. Develop
health education programs
5. Coordinate
health education programs
6. Implement
health education programs
7. Manage
health education programs and personnel
8. Evaluate
health education programs
9. Write
grants
10. Build coalitions
11. Identify resources
12. Make referrals
13. Develop social marketing and mass media
campaigns
14. Organize/mobilize communities for action
15. Handle controversial health issues/content
16. Advocate for health-related issues
17. Encourage healthy behavior
18. Use a variety of education/training methods
19. Develop audio, visual, print and electronic
materials
20. Conduct research
21. Write scholarly articles.
Job Opportunities and Career Prospects for Health Education Graduates in Nigeria
1. Specialist Careers in Health Education:
(a) Certified Education Specialist: The certified health educational master, or CHES, works to
assist patients in progressing their everyday health and quality of life
through healthcare-related instructive programs. Whereas their work is just as
centered on the entire community as that of other masters.
The healthcare education professionals have more centers
intelligent with individual people in traditional clinical situations, in this
way, making the world a better place, one individual per time.
(b) Healthcare Information Analyst: The information analyst works with healthcare providers to
raise broadly-focused educational campaigns. Their work is vital to
distinguishing existing, far-reaching issues in clinical healthcare settings,
as well as in pinpointing current deficiencies in existing open mindfulness
activities.
Whereas they may take part effectively in specific outreach
programs, their part is fundamentally within the gathering and examination of
essential data. For that reason, they may plan overviews, surveys, and
interviews, as well as program planning, to assemble vital information over
time.
(c) Community Promotion Specialist: This specialization, inside the entire field of healthcare
and open mindfulness, centers basically on general community mindfulness. Their
community may be an expansive association, a government body, a metropolitan
range, or a few other comprehensive statistics; ordinarily, it incorporates
thousands of different people unless their center is on a specific racial,
ethnic, or other narrowly defined statistics.
The objective of the CHPS position is to collate and examine
healthcare-related data, report on their findings, and plan campaigns to assist
the foremost fundamental data reach the whole community.
(d) Product Development Specialist: The corporate world offers expanding opportunities for healthcare
educational and promotional experts. One of the foremost sweeping career
opportunities accessible to the public with this capability is that of the item
improvement master. They incorporate a vast extend of obligations, but what it
sums to in a nutshell could be a two-pronged approach to open wellness: the
specialist helps within the design process, decreasing potential health
dangers, and is additionally capable for creating materials relating to the right
utilize of an item or service.
(e) Healthcare Promotional Specialists (HPS): A promotional specialist is something of a general
practitioner within this profession's range of careers, and who they interact
with in terms of how they associate as well as who they connect with. A few may
work with huge associations or other communities, whereas others might take a
patient-by-patient approach. They tend to center on specific areas of concern.
There are HPS professionals who concentrate on a wide range of growing concerns
today, from the spread of sexually transmitted diseases to contagious viral
organisms, to dental problems in children within a particular county or state.
2. Other Careers include;
(a) Health educator in schools (primary, secondary and universities)
(b) Community development worker
(c) Further education teacher
(d) Health service manager
(e) Health Counselor