Health Promotion

Foundations of Health Promotion
The fact that health and wellness mean different things to different people is not immediately apparent to all healthcare professionals. Cultural differences and individual differences related to perceptions of personal health, healing, and illness need to be taken into consideration as part of the duty to care. Respect for the person, and respect for autonomy remain primary ethical obligations in nursing. At the same time, nurses can also help patients to conceptualize health and healing in different ways, offering alternative perspectives and points of view without confronting, challenging, or criticizing a patient’s personal beliefs.
Nurses should also remain aware of theoretical orientations that guide their professional practice, and those of their colleagues and institutions. Theoretical orientations promote cross-cultural understanding, and illuminate the social determinants of health. Similarly, theoretical orientations may show why some patients use preventative services more often than others; or why some patients have greater perceived self-efficacy in their own health (“Social and Behavioral Theories,” n.d.). Each of these theories also helps nurses to better understand their patients, and account for differences between individuals or population groups. The health belief model and the transtheoretical models are both interesting for the same reasons: these perspectives show how patients perceive their role or responsibility, and how they perceive the roles of the healthcare professional.
Multiple nursing organizations like the American Nurses Association explicitly offer guidelines and official statements of commitment to patient populations. The National Institutes of Health also provide official white papers and statements of commitment to public health. For example, Savage & Kub (2009) refer to these and the World Health Organization and their mutual, ongoing inter-professional commitment to social justice within the healthcare professions.
References
Savage, C. & Kub, J. (2009). Public health and nursing. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 6(11): 2843-2848.
“Social and Behavioral Theories,” (n.d.). https://obssr.od.nih.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Social-and-Behavioral-Theories.pdf