Empowerment In Nursing Practice

The purpose of this assignment is to explore the principles of empowerment in nursing practice. The essay will define what health promotion is and how it is important to empowerment and how they both link. I will also be discussing my artefact and what health promotion models have been researched and used throughout my essay and in the making of my artefact and the reasoning behind the decisions. The main topic of this essay will be focusing on how I can empower someone with a learning disability to communicate using a communication board to express their wishes and needs to the medial staff.

During the late 1980’s the theme of empowerment was being discussed within many nursing literatures to link how empowering the patients, nurses, doctors

Empowerment became institutionalised within the “new public health” that called for individuals to build control over their own wellbeing and to increase control over their own health. Empowerment Strengthening subsequently turned into an idea integral to empowerment and empowerment training among medical professionals and their subsequent teams. Wellbeing advancement, group brain science and wellbeing training. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health promotion as a process of enabling people to increase control over and to improve their health (WHO, 1986). Nurse need to know about health promotion because they need to know what advice is good to give the patient, such as having an interaction with a patient that has diabetes and advising them of the importance of testing their blood sugars and how to control their diabetic diet. Children with learning disabilities have higher levels of health needs than the general population (Gurney et al, 2006; Nocon 2006), and this high level of need extends into adulthood (Barr et al.

The young person does not have a large range of verbal communication and has a diagnosis of Epilepsy, spastic Quadriplegic, cerebral palsy, developmental delay and a visual impairment and Autism. The young person can communicate with yes or no and is able to recognise picture symbols. The artefact I have designed is a communication board that uses the pecks system to enable patients 5 years to 18 years but can respectively be used for older patients. PECS was developed in 1985 at the Delaware Autism Program by Lori Frost and Andy Bondy (A., & Horton, C. 2010). The board could empower the individuals that could affect their health in many forms. While the system is commonly used as a communication aid for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), it has been used with a wide variety of learners, from pre-schoolers to adults, who have various communicative, cognitive, and physical impairments, including cerebral palsy, blindness, and deafness (A & Horton, c 2010). The use of technology such as iPhone and iPad have had a revolutionary effect on the assistive technology. They enable the user to simplify information as well as provide a valuable tool to help with topics such as communication but can provide the user with a way of communicating with others if their verbal communication range isn’t relatively good. Augmentative