TRADITIONAL COMMUNICATION AND PROMOTION OF GOOD HEALTH HABITS

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1       Background to the Study

            In distant past, the people that lived as families and clans in villages and towns communicated among themselves with different communication media. From the Stone Age up to the present computer generation, communication has been a tool with which to interact and sustain individuals and societies in general.

            Communication is the sharing or exchange of ideas, information, knowledge, attitude or feeling among two or more persons through certain signs and symbols with or without the purpose of affecting or changing the receiver either positively or negatively. Communication is central and critical to all human activities such as rural and national development as well as promoting good health habits. No community ever survived without communication.

In recent years, health professionals have developed a growing appreciation of the critical role that communication plays in healthcare. The effective communication of information on medical conditions and healthy lifestyles has played an important part in the improvement of the health status of people in the society. Communication thus plays an integral role in the delivery of healthcare and the promotion of health habits. Communication is used in creating public awareness, encouraging healthy behaviours, changing attitudes and motivating individuals to adopt recommended behaviours. This shows that communication and health are closely related and this dialectical relationship between communication and health has given rise to a specialized field of communication known as health communication.

            Health communication, according to Ratzan (1194), cited by Batta and Wilson (2013), is the act and technique of informing, influencing and motivating individuals, institutions and the public on important health issues. It encompasses the study and the use of communication strategies to inform and influence individual’s and community’s knowledge, attitude, practices and decisions with regard to health. Health is not just about the absence of diseases or infirmities, but also the same condition of man, physically, mentally and socially. Without good health, not much is possible. Politics, education, agriculture, trade and commerce; all depend on an optimal enjoyment of good health (Batta, 2013).

Health promotion is in the province of public communication, which confers a responsibility on individuals toward their fellow citizens. It serves the primary purpose of softening the ground for effective take-off of individual and national development. Thus when people are adequately informed about what it means to be in good health, and how they can be in good health, there is need to further persuade them to take practical steps toward achieving this in order to live a better life. The notion of promotion therefore operates on the premise that those living at the periphery where poverty, hunger and diseases are more pronounced, need to be educated, sensitized and be motivated continually to practise and participate in programmes and projects that will help them to be aware of their actions and activities towards the achievement of good health.

Health promotion is a communication action. Hence, the message code needs to be properly conceived and delivered in order to bring about the desired attitude and behavioural change of human, community, state and the nation at large. The people in Uruan, like those in other communities in Akwa Ibom State, are people afflicted by the vicious cycle of poverty, ignorance and illiteracy. The dominant means of communication in Uruan are those of traditional communication.