Recap:

Main Lessons
From First Stop in Learning Journey

How our minds shape our behaviour

The School of Health Sciences, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore

Your Learning Points

Congratulations. You have just finished exploring the first leg of you radventure through the behavioural sciences! The concepts might complicated but fret not! Your friends and your learning guide will by your side should you ever need help. That is why we implemented the e-Learning and team-based learning (TBL) approach.

Here are the main learning points below. Click to see more.

BioPsychoSocial Model of Health

We looked at how a patient is more than just a passive recipient of medical intervention. How patients think, feel or the influence from their social environment can contribute to their compliance level.
The concepts described above is the Biopsychosocial Model of Health. This concept involves looking at patients in the totality of their physical body, psychological condition and their social influences.
The key point in this model is that we must look at medical intervention as a whole. When one thing shifts (for e.g. Medical Conditions) the other two aspects of the patients' (Psychology and Sociology) will also shift.
The Biopsychosocial model than sets up your learning for the most important theory in Term 1, called the Health Belief Model.

Psychology and the Science of Behaviour

We often assume that our behaviour is either spontaneous or is what we are born with. In this section, we learn that in order to understand why we behave in a certain way, we must first look at the "calculations" that is going on in our mind that shapes our behaviour.
Applying this to patients, we must understand that our patients are more than just a bed number and they have their hopes and fears, dreams and frustrations. So when confronted with a health challenge, these patients may not necessary do what is medically beneficial for them. To help patients go on this "pathway", we must first under what they think so that we can counsel them about the right course of actions to take.
There are "tools" from within psychology that can help us analyse and look at patients' behaviours. The Health Belief Model is the key theory that we will use in Term 1.

Health Belief Model

This model provides us with a theoretical structure to see how patients make their medical decision.
From this model, we know the patients are influenced by how they think and how they think are in relation to their social environment. So factors such as Gender (being male, female or transgender), age, social class (education, economic and occupation) can impact the way patients think and their perceptions of the points below.
It looks at how the parents often have to juggle Perceived Benefits and Perceived Barriers in order to establish a basis for moving forward.
In order for that to happen, the patients must first establish a sense of "safety" for themselves when they balance Perceived Severity and Perceived Susceptibility in order to access the Perceived Threat of their medical illnesses.
The model looks at something called Cues to Action to get us to think of how in our communication with our patients, we can make use of certain information to strengthen these triggers.