Nursing Theories for Health Promotion and Risk in a Community

Nursing Theories: Health Risk and Health Promotion in a Community

Part 1

Self-care is the conducting of practices by the individuals themselves who suffer from a health condition. The practices they would conduct for their self-care would include monitoring of their condition, avoiding food items and related activities that could induce illness, making an effort to maintain their health levels adhere to the given prescribed medicines and treatment, managing any possibly occurring symptoms or side-effects, accomplishing personal rehabilitation and prevention of activities that might give way to long-term ailment or disability.

Nurses play an integral role in helping the patient conduct these self-care practices since education about a health condition and how self-management at home could help improve their health positively affects the entire community. Making the patients independent in taking care of themselves so that they do not have to rely on physicians, doctors, or nurses all the time, especially at that time of the day when it is impossible to reach out for help, the shaping of their attitudes and bringing behavioral change towards a health condition is mandatory. Nurses are a great support for eliminating the barriers that hinder these patients in complying with the self-management strategies so that more people’s physical, psychological and special needs could be fulfilled for better patient outcomes (Jones, 2020).

The part theory plays in community nursing could not be overemphasized as theory and community nursing have been strong for ages. Orem’s self-care deficit theory of nursing discusses the practices that individuals undertake to take care of themselves to improve their health conditions and maintain their health levels on a long-term basis (Chipu & Downing, 2020). The theory talks about self-efficacy, self-regulation, and self-monitoring with effective education about their illness. For example, suppose an individual is suffering from hypertension. In that case, he should be able to monitor his blood pressure with the adequately available monitoring devices, should be aware of the device’s use, should know the importance of regular monitoring of his blood pressure daily or weekly, and should know the limitations of medication and treatment steps have not adhered. The patient should learn these tactics with the help of nurses, especially if the most prevalent health condition in a specified community is hypertension, such as African American older immigrants’ adults.

To prevent such a condition from becoming a chronic illness, nurses help make the patient become self-reliant and string to be dependent upon their knowledge in self-care. According to Orem’s theory, the patient is responsible enough to take care of themselves. Being an adult, nurses make them capable enough to make their own decisions with supported community education and timely guidance (Khademian, Ara & Gholamzadeh, 2020). Supervision, mentoring, mobilization of the resources for making a patient’s health condition better, self-awareness, problem-solving ability, personal religious views, self-motivation, participation in self-adherence techniques, and becoming autonomous in self-care are some of the areas in which nurses help the patients for self-aid and management of the disease at a community level (Chipu & Downing, 2020).

The nursing education and research must take serious note of the self-care and self-efficacy of the patients so that preaching the physical, psychological, and spiritual attitudes to the patients becomes convenient. Nurses play an enablement role in providing the motivation and ensuring the availability of the resources to the patient that would help them realize how self0care is important for bringing betterment in their health. The theory and clinical practice go hand in hand so that professionalism could rely on the evidence that has been corroborated by the previous experts in the same field, and their implementation does not pose any risks for the community.

Part 2

The most common form of consuming tobacco is cigarette smoking which has caused lethal consequences for American society for the past several decades. More than 480,000 deaths in the United States are attributed to cigarette smoking, the premature deaths of US citizens have been more than those who have died in US wars, 90% of deaths are from lung cancer, and 80% of the expiries are due to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease or COPD (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020-a).

This particular health risk has been identified for the community in the health assessment, and its impact is predicted to be on a state, national and global level if not controlled in time. It is not only about one community, but if the effects are not stopped from the basic level, then it would expand globally, already accounting for up to 8 million people dying from tobacco use each year by the year 2030 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020-b). Since it is a form of preventable death that can be stopped once someone quits smoking, negative impacts on everybody’s organs could be averted. Huge economic costs could be saved to treat patients who have lung cancer, mouth cancers, heart diseases, diabetes, and COPD. As the economic cost is the total burden the country has to endure collectively with the direct (the costs that are directly incurred for the treatment of smoking-induced cancer patients) and indirect costs (the future costs of the job losses, leaves, and production loss), therefore, the control of the disease on a community level becomes extremely vital (Nguyen, Han & Oh, 2019).