**7.1 Medical approach**

This approach focuses on reducing morbidity and mortality. Activity is focused on whole populations or high-risk groups. This type of health promotion seeks to increase clinical interventions to prevent disease and early death.

The clinical method focuses on treatment of diseases to prevent complications and premature death. It targets individuals or groups who are exposed to diseases or those who are already sick. This approach is basically targeting people that are sick to ameliorate their sickness as such it is the center of medical intervention. In the approach, the professional has the responsibility to ensure people adhere to treatment regimens. In most instances, sick people do not have full information of the reasons for their actions, they carry out the health promotion actions because of the directives of the health professionals.

The clinical method to health promotion is unique because:


The medical approach to health promotion has three levels of intervention:


The principle of preventive services such as immunization and screening is that they target at-risk groups. Immunization only works if people get their vaccinations. Disease screening is offered to certain groups of people, for example, prostate screening is offered to men who are 55 to 69 years of age. Screening is only effective if the following conditions are met:


Preventive strategies should be based on epidemiological proof. The medical approach is predicated on having an infrastructure able to support screening and immunization programmes. This consists of educated personnel, laboratory facilities, information systems, and in the case of immunization, an effective and safe vaccine. It is obvious that the medical approach to health promotion is complicated procedure and may rely on national programmes or guidelines.
