Health Promotion Research Paper

3. HEALTH PROMOTION CONCEPT Introduction

Health care focused on the treatment model for services rendered however this has changed to finding the root cause of disease and what enhances good health and wellness. Health promotion as defined by the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, 1986. Is “the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health”’. The change in life style and behaviours can only occur when nurses help the individuals, families and communities to see reasons why certain behaviours are inimical to healthy life. This will in turn decrease chronic diseases and the financial burden patients experience.

Nurses need to know how to plan, assess, implement and evaluate such health promotion

I deal with a lot of clients who in spite of their level of education are still ignorant about health promoting behaviours. So during immunization clinics, antenatal clinics and diabetes/hypertension clinics we teach and demonstrate health promoting behaviours and answer their questions. For instance, through statistics, we discovered a lot of babies were admitted for diarrhoeal diseases. This is not strange in the communities but it was worrisome to us because our clients were graduates from the universities who supposedly were enlightened. Clients were invited along with their wives and a campaign for handwashing and simple hygiene was done for them. Some of our staff were sent to their homes to inspect their environments. It was discovered in some homes that even though they had clean environments. Their dust bins were in their kitchens which encouraged flies around the

These include among others patterns of consumption of food and drinks, family patterns, culture economic changes and demographic –patterns. Hence adopting health promotion interventions can be used to address these issues. This should be done in schools, hospitals, communities and should be included in health policies. Only the can we solve most of our global health issues wholestically. Nurses need to have the expertise to be good health promoters. They practice in different health settings and as such they use a variety of expertise in health promotions which have been classified by Whitehead, 2011 as general health promoters, project management health promoters and patient-focused health promoters. However, the most common method of intervention used by nurses is health education (Parker et al.,