Editor's note: This post was written by Chloe Feinberg, knowledge consultant at Ashoka Changemakers®.
The idea of maintaining health is gaining ever more prominence and importance. Health maintenance is in some ways similar to health prevention, but is also quite different.
Preventive health is used to describe the many ways and opportunities to prevent the worsening of health or the development of disease. But what if a person is already sick? What about the individuals living with asthma, or who have high blood pressure?
Even for those with health issues, there is room for improving, or at least maintaining, the current level of health. Take me for example. I’m not asthmatic, but my lungs can only take in about 70 percent of the amount of air that a “normal” person my age and size can breath in.
The technical term is obstructive pulmonary disease, and realistically my lungs aren’t going to get better. The breathing exercise, physical exercise, and occasional inhalers are supposed to prevent my lungs from getting worse. In effect, I aim to maintain my health, fully well aware that I’ll never be completely “healthy” compared to those without my condition.
Speaking from personal experience, health maintenance isn’t easy. Studies have shown that as soon as people start feeling better—i.e., their symptoms stop or occur less frequently—patients drastically reduce their adherence to medication regimens, skip treatments, or minimize other maintenance activities (health eating, exercise, etc.). This can lead to a patient’s condition worsening, even when they start to feel better in the short term.
So what is too be done? Many of the entries in the Innovations for Health competition that there is a healthy dose (pardon the pun) of innovators working to address the maintenance of health—whatever the benchmark may be.
What we need are more... more innovations to make engaging and maintaining health easy, accessible, and simple enough to fold into everyday life. After all, maintenance is not a one-time thing, but often requires building new habits and adjusting aspects of a patient’s lifestyle.
We know that preventive health measures encounter many obstacles that often revolve around behavior change of some kind. So let’s make sure we continue to innovate for those who may already be “less than healthy,” but need to maintain their level of health in order to avoid developing more drastic conditions.
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