Ben Franklin's proverb that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure makes sense to all of us, especially in medicine. Why wouldn't you want to prevent lung cancer by helping someone quit smoking? Preventive health care is something that family doctors excel at. We use evidence-based medicine to focus on how best to prevent heart attacks, detect cancer early, and prevent infectious diseases through immunization. But do we target the right people and populations in our specific preventive efforts? Do we know the most impactful preventive strategies? For the incidence and mortality rates associated with common types of cancer, the inverse S-shaped probability weighting found in experimental studies leads to a significant increase in demand values for both treatment and prevention.
We want to be able to understand what these signals look like as the patient transitions to the disease, develop algorithms that can pick up warning signs, and provide pleasant ways to involve patients in prevention. The cost of treating the disease, which sometimes includes secondary and tertiary preventive measures. Increasing acceptance of preventive services requires multifaceted strategies, including, but not limited to, organizational leadership, education, measurement, and reimbursement. We use the range-dependent utility framework to explore how the demand for prevention and treatment alters when people assess probabilities in a non-linear manner.
Your work to prevent diseases can be very important in avoiding the disadvantages of health care provided in reaction to the contraction of avoidable diseases. As risk takers, they provide the payment models and the influence and incentives that can affect the acceptance of chronic disease prevention services. Most bioengineering efforts should be directed at the level of prevention, because prevention is better than cure. A multi-pronged approach would include strong organizational leadership, changes in institutional culture, team-based care, care systems that adapt to preventive services, and a willingness of patients to seek and participate in preventive care.
All nursing and midwifery staff are well positioned to do so and must accept the contribution they can make to prevention.
