Low Frequency Noise and the Impact upon an Individual's Quality of Life: Case Study Rerports

摘要

Recent work reported from studies in the promotion of mental health, has highlighted the problems encountered by health professionals when seeking to establish common ground between themselves and sufferers (International Mental Health Promotion, 1997). The problems appear to be characterised first by a break down in an understanding of behavioural objectives for health, for example what should good health look like in behavioural terms'? Second, problems in working with a common language, one that meets both sufferers and professional's needs through a capability to relate subjective experience to assessment protocols, One consequence of the continued and increasing practice of community-based care is the growth in the number and diversity of 'ill health' symptoms that are now to be resolved within the community. It is common for the primary health professional to be required to cope and work with expressed behaviours associated: with a full range of psychiatrically manic-depressives and phobics. While, according to Edmans and Shaw (1997) the new priority area for health promotion is that of anxiety and depression. A collection of case study materials, drawn from the experiences of primary health care professionals in the UK, will be use to illustrate some of the problems encountered in the design of community-based treatment interventions based upon existing assessment criteria and practices. As the grey, area surrounding health grows, a number of cases/individuals also subject to assessment based upon limited criterial effectiveness, have tended to migrate from the care offered by Environmental Health Agencies (EHA's) to that of primary care. It is argued that assessment criteria and related interventions from the EHA's and health professionals (typically the General Practitioner), confronted by apparently dysfunctional behaviours exhibited by rnany sufferers complaining of Low Frequency Noise; (LFN), are inappropriate (Benton and Greeff, 1997). The assessment environment for the LFN sufferer is characterised by assumptions concerning what appropriate or 'healthy' behaviour should look like, given the assessment of the physical situation.