Health Promotion and Wellness Strategies, Coursework Example

Introduction

Health promotion and wellness in nursing practice requires nurses to evaluate patients in accordance with the required protocols and to aim to address the tools that are required to promote wellness and to achieve the desired treatment objectives. This process requires nurses to fulfill their responsibilities to patients, and this includes the minimization of errors and the improvement of patient care quality. In this capacity, nurses must communicate with patients effectively and provide a high level of support that will also motivate patients to listen to guidance and advice regarding health promotion and wellness. This process demonstrates the importance of evaluating patients properly and in determining how to best promote greater health and wellbeing that will have a lasting impact on healthcare outcomes for patients. Therefore, nurses must be able to work collaboratively with patients, such as those from the veteran population, who may find it difficult to comply with the recommended health promotion strategies for a variety of reasons. It is a nurse’s responsibility to aim to encourage these activities and to be successful in their efforts to facilitate change within this and other vulnerable patient populations.

Analysis

Nurses must acquire the appropriate knowledge and a greater understanding of their responsibility to patients with respect to health promotion, and this will also promote patient care quality for populations with the greatest level of need (Shannon, 2013). For the selected population, nurses must be able to recognize the critical barriers that exist that have an impact on the health and wellbeing of this population; for example, the veteran population faces a number of different challenges that have a direct impact on their health, such as unemployment and poverty, a dependency on drugs and alcohol, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other issues. In this context, nurses must be educated regarding the needs of the designated population as best as possible (Shannon, 2013).

In the nursing profession, health promotion remains a critical challenge with a less than desirable level of support from a policymaking perspective (Whitehead, 2010). Therefore, patients must be able to demonstrate their ability to expand health promotion and establish policies that will have a lasting impact on patient care and outcomes in different ways that have yet to be explored or integrated into the practice environment (Whitehead, 2010). These factors require a change in discourse and an expansion of knowledge to encourage health promotion activities as part of nursing practice, using practice evidence as a guide in order to create new policies that specifically address health promotion for patients (Whitehead, 2010). Nurses must embrace their responsibility to patients to facilitate health promotion by recognizing the different needs that impact populations so that health promotion is targeted towards these specific conditions (Whitehead, 2010). In this context, nurses must be able to identify how their practice environment might improve as a result of these conditions over time (Whitehead, 2010).

An article by Sorensen et.al (2013) supports the development of metrics to identify areas where health promotion might provide a considerable benefit to nursing practice and to healthcare outcomes. It is believed that health promotion activities may be most effective in conjunction with health protection, as this combination may improve behavioral change in some patient populations when they recognize that they must take specific measures to protect their health and to reduce the risk of illness (Sorensen et.al, 2013). Nonetheless, this combined approach is not well explored and does not reflect a critical understanding of its potential impact on patients (Sorensen et.al, 2013). Therefore, it is important to identify a strategy to address this issue and to consider the impact of health promotion and health protection as a combined approach that may have a considerable impact on addressing specific needs of various population groups (Sorensen et.al, 2013).

Health promotion must continue to evolve into many different areas in order to have a lasting and positive impact on health and wellbeing, and this is achieved through the development of strategies that will increase the impact of this practice on health outcomes (Dombrowski, Snelling, & Kalicki, 2014). In particular, nurses must be able to recognize the value of health promotion as they work with specific patient populations, such as veterans, as they may struggle to get through to these patients due to the risks associated with their status and the obstacles that they face (Dombrowski et.al, 2014). This practice, therefore, requires nurses to embrace health promotion and to recognize how to best overcome the issues that may arise with respect to adopting a health promotion strategy as best as possible (Dombrowski et.al, 2014). It is believed that with increased support from the nursing community, these efforts will move forward on a gradual basis that will begin to impact the target populations in a consistent manner (Dombrowski et.al, 2014).

Conclusion

Health promotion in nursing practice requires an understanding of how this process will impact specific patient populations so that they are able to buy into this process and be able to improve upon their behaviors in accordance with the desired objectives to impact their health in a significant manner. However, there must be an increased emphasis on this process and how it influences patients in order to gain support for the process and form a set of policies that emphasize the critical nature of health promotion as part of the process of health improvement, particularly in the most vulnerable populations where this need is most significant and important for the nursing practice environment.

References

Dombrowski, J.J., Snelling, A.M., & Kalicki, M. (2014). Health promotion overview: evidence-based strategies for occupational health nursing practice. Workplace Health & Safety, 62 (8), 342-349.

Shannon, C. (2013). It all starts here: merging the role of nursing education and community-based health promotion. International Journal of Nursing Science, 3(1), 15-21.

Sorensen, G. McLellan, D., Dennerlein, J.T., Pronk, N.P., Allen, J.D., Boden, L.I., Okechukwu, C.A., Hashimoto, D., Stoddard, A., & Wagner, G. (2013). Integration of health protection and health promotion: rationale, indicators, and metrics. Journal of Environmental Medicine, 55(Suppl 12), S12-S18.

Whitehead, D. (2010). Health promotion in nursing: a Derridean discourse analysis. Health Promotion International, 26(1), 117-127.