Health Promotion and Nursing Practice During the Essay

Health Promotion and Nursing Practice

During the last three decades the concept of health promotion has emerged from within the overall field of nursing, presenting a proactive method through which health care workers can empower their patients to prevent disease and maintain optimal health. While scholars, medical researchers, and professional nurses have all classified the practice of health promotion in varying terms throughout the years, the consensus definition of the term was provided by the World Health Organization's Bangkok Charter for Health Promotion in a Globalized World, which stated that "health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over their health and its determinants, and thereby improve their health" (2005). Health promotion programs have since become a fundamental aspect of nursing practice, because modern nurses are expected to exceed the previous standard of evaluation and treatment by becoming actively partnering with their patients to assure positive health outcomes are consistently achieved. The comprehensive theory of health promotion actually covers three distinct aspects of health care, with primary health promotion advocating anticipatory measures to prevent new occurrences of disease or injury, secondary health promotion stressing the maintenance of existing conditions to cure or keep them from becoming chronic, and tertiary health promotion working to maximize the health conditions for those suffering from disease, disability or debilitating injury. By reviewing three scholarly articles, each of which contributes to primary, secondary, or tertiary health promotion, and conducting a comparative analysis of their conclusions, a nursing student can begin to form a useful educational foundation in the practice of health promotion for later use in the professional realm.

The first article to be reviewed, Health Promotion in Sexual Health: Different Theories and Models of Health Promotion, was published by contraceptive and sexual health nurse Jane Barnes in 2009 to assess the various perspectives regarding health promotion and its application to preventative sexual health care. The author observes that because "health promotion is an important aspect of service provision in sexual health care it is important to use an approach that maximizes impact with clients," before concluding that this could "include encouraging clients' participation -- a bottom-up approach" due to the fact that "health promotion ultimately means stimulating clients to use measures to improve and sustain their health" (Barnes, 2009). The relative merits of the "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches to health promotion, terms which are used to describe care dictated solely by doctor directive and cooperative care involving…