Health Promotion and Maintenance in Nursing Professional Practice Paper

Health Promotion and Maintenance in Nursing Professional Practice Paper

Health Promotion and Maintenance in Nursing Professional Practice Paper

The identified priority concept for this paper is health promotion and maintenance. Content under this concept includes antenatal care, self-care, the aging process, and newborn care. Health promotion and maintenance entails assisting individuals to achieve and maintain optimal health. The nurse assists individuals in identifying their target health status, identifying their strengths and needs, and supporting their path to attaining the full potential of their health and wellness (Phillips, 2019). In addition, the nurse helps individuals to promote their health through three levels of disease prevention: primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the concept of health promotion and maintenance in nursing professional practice.

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Importance                                 

The concept of health promotion and maintenance is significant to professional nursing practice since one of the roles of nurses surrounds health promotion, wellness, and recovery. Nurses provide personalized health education and self-care instructions to the patient. This begins with assessing a patient’s educational needs by asking about their health history and current medical diagnoses or problems (Phillips, 2019). By promoting and maintaining individuals’ health, nurses lower the number of patients seeking curative services and those hospitalized due to preventable diseases, thus lowering their workload and reducing associated fatigue and burnout. Health promotion and maintenance are also important to the general patient population because it helps to eliminate disease risk factors from the environment. It also guides individuals in lifestyle modifications to prevent disease, like smoking cessation, dietary changes, increased physical activity, and safe sexual practices (Phillips, 2019). The simple lifestyle changes help individuals prevent diseases that would otherwise have impaired their quality of life (QoL), caused morbidities and mortalities, and led to high medical costs. However, health promotion is more effective when it is tailored to an individual’s specific health risks, suitable to the situation, and responsive to the individual’s interest.

Failure to address health promotion and maintenance can adversely affect nursing practice since there will be increased incidences of preventable diseases. Nurses would have to manage many cases of diseases diagnosed in advanced stages. Besides, patients would be significantly affected since they would suffer from preventable diseases due to a lack of awareness of strategies to prevent diseases and promote health (Yousefi et al., 2019). They would also endure high morbidity and mortality from late diagnosis and treatment of diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and cancer, as well as poor health outcomes and QoL.

Healthcare Disparities, Inequalities, and Interventions

Pregnant women may be adversely impacted if the concept of health promotion and maintenance is unresolved. Health-promoting practices are an essential concept and determinant of health status in pregnancy. Health promotion in pregnancy entails educating expectant women about good hygiene, optimal nutrition, adequate rest, healthy lifestyle practices, complications of pregnancy, family planning, exclusive breastfeeding, and immunization. Fathnezhad-Kazemi & Hajian (2019) explain that many women identify safe approaches to promote a healthy pregnancy when they get pregnant and plan to make positive behavioral changes. However, some pregnant mothers fail to adopt healthy behaviors, which endanger the pregnancy as they face diseases that risk their pregnancy, like gestational diabetes, Anemia, hypertension, systemic infections, and puerperal endometritis. Besides, poor lifestyle practice affects the fetus outcomes due to preterm birth, low birth weight, and severe neonatal conditions that lead to neonatal mortality. Furthermore, failing to address nutrition in pregnancy is dangerous since it leads to a deficiency of macro- and micro-nutrients.

The healthcare disparities in health promotion for pregnant women can be addressed by applying a woman-focused approach to health promotion. The approach entails the nurse or midwife assessing a pregnant woman’s health promotion needs and supporting her to meet these needs. This leads the woman to her health agenda and actively engages them in promoting their health. Dayyani et al. (2021) found that midwives perceived that health promotion was provided when they paid attention to the competencies of a pregnant woman to take action or strengthen their self-efficacy. Thus, midwives and nurses caring for pregnant women need to learn how they can implement woman-focused care while at the same time providing preventative, evidence-based care. To further improve women’s health, healthcare providers should focus on the woman-focused approach. Furthermore, training and supervision can enhance providers’ health education and communication skills concerning the woman-focused HP approach.

Legal & Ethical Considerations and Intervention Challenges

Health promotion and maintenance interventions customarily bring up legal and ethical issues since they seek to influence individuals’ perceptions and lifestyles. Besides, the interventions are often initiated, financed, and influenced by government agencies or influential public and private organizations. Guttman (2018) explains that ethical implications may arise in relation to distributive justice, which occurs when there is an unequal or unfair provision of health promotion services. Ethical issues can surface when there is an unequal distribution of health promotion opportunities in the population to equally enable individuals to attain health goals. Legal implications can arise due to infringement of people’s privacy (Guttman, 2018). Legal issues usually relate to the use of graphic materials, such as human suffering, which may be upsetting or expose individuals to sights they do not wish to be exposed to.

            Ethical dilemmas in health promotion can be mitigated by tailoring health promotion programs to center on specific population segments. This is a practical and ethical strategic move to promote equity in health promotion. Besides, it necessitates the provision of equal and culturally appropriate health messages to populations with varying sociocultural backgrounds and literacy levels (Guttman, 2018). On the other hand, legal implications can be prevented by seeking informed consent and informing individuals that corporations, organizations, and government agencies may obtain their health data for health promotion activities. Moreover, standards and procedures should be set to ensure that informed consent is obtained for diverse populations.

Low health literacy levels can hinder the success of preventing preventable diseases among various patient populations. This affects their ability to apply provided health messages to promote health. The success of resolving health promotion and maintenance in nursing practice can be hindered by limited access to health promotion services due to geographical barriers, inadequate transportation options, and lack of insurance (Yousefi et al.,  2019). Lack of insurance may limit individuals from accessing preventive care, including screening services, hindering early diagnosis and treatment.

Participants and Interdisciplinary Approach

An interdisciplinary team will provide health promotion and maintenance. The team will include registered nurses (RNs), advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs), physicians, midwives, laboratory technologists, nutritionists, and complementary therapists. APRNs and physicians will conduct health screening for chronic illnesses. They will also obtain health histories and perform health and risk assessments and targeted screening assessments. RNs will implement primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention approaches (Yousefi et al., 2019). Furthermore, midwives will provide health promotion to women and their families in the prenatal and postpartum period and educate them on newborn care.

Laboratory technologists will be involved in screening individuals for blood glucose and cholesterol levels, which facilitates early diagnosis. The nutritionist will carry out targeted nutrition screening assessments and educate individuals on healthy dietary practices to prevent nutrition-related conditions. In addition, the complementary therapists will provide complementary therapies and integrate them into the health promotion plans to promote patient comfort (Yousefi et al., 2019). Team members outside the nursing profession include nutritionists and laboratory technologists. Including members from different professions is vital because it draws together a wide range of healthcare professionals with diverse knowledge, skills, and qualifications to provide high-quality and specialized health promotion services.

Quality Improvement

Addressing health promotion and maintenance will significantly promote patient outcomes by reducing the prevalence of preventable diseases leading to better health outcomes in the general population. Besides, health promotion during the antepartum and postpartum period will significantly reduce maternal and infant mortality rates (Dayyani et al., 2021). Addressing the concept will also impact nurses since they will have a reduced workload from patients with preventable diseases. There will be a reduced burden of care for chronic illnesses since addressing lifestyle practices will reduce the incidence of these diseases and improve self-care practices in individuals diagnosed with the diseases, reducing admission rates.

Better patient outcomes can be achieved using technology resources like electronic health records (EHRs). EHRs efficiently collect data in a manner that can be shared across various healthcare facilities. The data can be used in health promotion activities and improve an organization’s and providers’ ability to prevent diseases, thus improving public health outcomes in the clinical setting. Continuing medical education (CME) can increase nurses’ professional knowledge (Cant & Levett-Jones, 2021). CME activities seek to develop, maintain, or improve nurses’ knowledge, skills, and professional performance they need to provide services to patients and the profession.

Conclusion

The nurse identifies the patient’s risk factors for future health needs and plans for health promotion interventions. Promoting and maintaining individuals’ health lowers nurses’ workload since there is less utilization of curative health services. Therefore, there is a need to increase nursing EBP knowledge related to health promotion and maintenance to empower nurses to provide quality preventive care to various patients. Addressing health promotion can reduce the incidence of diseases and promote a healthier nation while giving nurses more time and resources for other disease burdens.

References

Cant, R., & Levett-Jones, T. (2021). Umbrella review: Impact of registered nurses’ continuing professional education informed by contemporary reviews of literature. Nurse Education in Practice, 50, 102945. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2020.102945

Dayyani, I., Lou, S., & Jepsen, I. (2021). Midwives’ provision of health promotion in antenatal care: A qualitative explorative study. Women and Birth. doi:10.1016/j.wombi.2021.01.010

Fathnezhad-Kazemi, A., & Hajian, S. (2019). Factors influencing the adoption of health-promoting behaviors in overweight pregnant women: a qualitative study. BMC pregnancy and childbirth, 19(1), 43. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12884-019-2199-5

Guttman, N. (2018). Ethical issues in health promotion and communication interventions. In Oxford research encyclopedia of communication. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.118

Phillips, A. (2019). Effective approaches to health promotion in nursing practice. Nursing standard (Royal College of Nursing (Great Britain): 1987), 34(4), 43–50. https://doi.org/10.7748/ns.2019.e11312

Smith, H. J., Portela, A. G., & Marston, C. (2018). Improving implementation of health promotion interventions for maternal and newborn health. BMC pregnancy and childbirth, 17(1), 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12884-017-1450-1

Yousefi, H., Ziaee, E. S., & Golshiri, P. (2019). Nurses’ consultative role to health promotion in patients with chronic diseases. Journal of Education and Health Promotion, pp. 8, 178. https://doi.org/10.4103/jehp.jehp_146_19