Promoting Health and Well-being

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  Unit8 –A01 – Promoting health and well being

Introduction

The aim of this assignment is to carry out a health promotion campaign on an area that I feel is being publicised regularly in the media.  The area that I have chosen is binge drinking as it is growing concern in today’s society and by carrying out this campaign I hope to raise awareness within my chosen target group.  I will look at the different aspects on binge drinking and the different campaigns undertaken by the government in order to control binge drinking. I will carry out both primary and secondary research in order to devise my health promotion campaign.

What is binge drinking?

There is no actual definition of the term ‘binge drinking’ although it is usually defined as drinking more than half the recommended weekly intake in one session.  It is important to recognise that the majority of people do not consider themselves to be binge drinking as they may be oblivious to the recommended weekly allowance or they may be on a night out and do not realise that they are binge drinking/.

People ‘binge drink for many reasons but it often caused by:

  • Peer pressure from friends
  • To escape from the pressures of life in order to relax.
  • To increase self confidence and self esteem to deal with social situations
  • To have fun

        

Binge drinking is also drinking with the intention of getting drunk, drinking as much as possible in a short pace of time and also to the point in which you lose control.  Binge drinking is caused by the decrease of alcohol prices so people are able to afford more.  Also most people today have an increased disposable income to which they are able to spend anywhere, and most people feel spending it on drink it beneficiary.

Drinking surveys in the UK normally define Binge drinkers as men drinking eight or more units of alcohol in one drinking session and for a woman it would be six or more units.  This is double the maximum recommended ‘safe limit’s’ for men and women respectively.  Many experts and institutions now use this as a definition of binge drinking. The ‘National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’ defines binge drinking as a pattern of drinking that brings a person’s blood alcohol concentration (BAC) to 0.08 grams percent or above.  Below is a graph that shows the results of a survey carried between 1998 till 2005 of the percentage of people drinking more than the daily number of units of alcohol: (www.sirc.org/publik/binge_drinking.shtml)

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(www.sirc.org/publik/binge_drinking.shtml)

From this graph we can see that a higher percentage of men drink more than the recommended daily number units of alcohol than woman.  But in 2004 we can see that the percentage of men binge drinking has decreased and the percentage of women has slightly decreased.

Statistics:

Binge drinking has become more and more common in today’s society especially with college students as it has become the norm that they go out and get drunk ...

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