Health promotion has been seen to play a significant role in the healthcare industry. Health promotion has brought about the assimilation of theories that help address family, community, and even individual behavioural change to assist in promoting health. With this in mind, nurses have based their practice on these theories so as to improve the quality of care they provide to their patients. Most of these nursing theories have been derived from nursing disciplines and models (Hitchcock, 2003).
They assist in constructing a different inter-relationship between concepts so as to explain, predict, provide and describe how a phenomenon is viewed. For many nurses and pioneers in the nursing industry, nursing theories and models help to show how patients’ lives are improved with the support of the nursing profession. The primary objective of this paper is to discuss the importance of nursing theory while reviewing one of these theories and how nurses apply it in their business.
One of the middle-range theories nurses have been seen to employ is the Health promotion model (HPM). In most instances, nurses apply this approach with the sole purpose of improving their patients well being. By using this theory, nurses get a chance to identify any negative health behaviour in their patients and refer them to programs that help promote behavioural change. The HPM was founded under three pillars, namely behavioural outcomes, individual characteristics, and behaviour cognition, and all these components have assisted in influencing client health behaviour. Putting this in mind, a nurse has an obligation to find a way that these concepts impact their customer’s willingness to begin engaging in health-promoting behaviour.
Health policies have been designed and developed to help in delivering health care services to an individual as best as possible (Taylor, 2007). . However, when it comes to determining a patient’s lifespan, preventive care has to be overlooked in budgetary allocations and policy planning. Some of the factors that have been seen to lead to preventive care being missed include high-cost effectiveness and low-priority setting. With the help of preventive interventions, negative behavioural patterns can be modified. These preventive interventions can be used to reduce chronic diseases such as kidney failure. One benefit that can be gathered from preventive care is that it paves the way for an improved quality of life and public health. Every nurse must educate their patients on how they can live a healthy life that is a disease. With proper counselling, end-stage renal failure can be prevented.
According to Raingruber (2016), a nurse’s practice goes beyond counselling, education, and guidance. With the promotion of this preventive care, patients are assured of living a life that is characterized by practices that protect them from illness. This proves that the implementation of preventive care helps nurses achieve their primary goal which is having patients that are healthy. Preventive care can also pave the way for a reduced workload as it enables the general public to experience less disease, and this reduces the number of care nurses have to give patients. Properly educated patients, on the other hand, reduce their ER visits and resubmissions caused by chronic disease. Chronic diseases such as kidney failure have a chance of being prevented with regular checkups and appropriate screening.
Nurses have always been told to keep in mind Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs when attending to their patients. By looking at the hierarchy of needs, it becomes easy to assess the reason behind an individual acting in a certain way. According to Maslow, people are always motivated to achieve individual needs, and some needs might take precedence over others. He goes ahead to say that one of the core needs of every individual is physical survival and this motivates how a person behaves. With this in mind, it becomes important for nurses to evaluate how they will help their patients become better.
For instance, when dealing with a patient who is suffering from End end-stage renal failure, it becomes easier for the nurse to know what to do with the client by understanding what caused it. One way this ailment can be caused is through drug usage and abuse. The patient might have indulged in drug usage to survive (maybe to earn money).
With the help of the HPM and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the nurse is in a position to promote behaviours that help improve the quality of life by reducing disease. By educating the general population on the immeasurable advantages of preventive care, chronic diseases are highly reduced (Potter, 2016). According to the HPM, nurses can do this by encouraging their patients to participate in risk behaviour reduction. The only way people can avoid acquiring End-stage renal failure is if they are educated on what causes it and how it can be prevented. This disease has no cure, and nurses should let the public know what it entails and how it is acquired.
Pender’s health Promotion Model was founded on pillars that ensure nurses get to watch their patients’ health behaviour. With the help of this model, the nursing profession has been given a framework that helps them initiate preventive care. Nurses get a chance to identify which tactics to employ when encouraging health promotion in any patient population, all thanks to the Health Promotion Model. Thus, every nurse should take it upon themselves to educate and guide their patients on the importance of behaviour change, how to manage chronic ailments and promote wellness.
References
Hitchcock, J., Schubert, P., & Thomas, S. (2003). Community health nursing. Australia: Thomson/Delmar Learning.
Kidney failure/ESRD. (2017). Kidneyfund.org. Retrieved 1 July 2017, from http://www.kidneyfund.org/kidney-disease/kidney-failure/?referrer=https://www.google.com/#what_causes_kidney_failure
Potter, P., Perry, A., Stockert, P., & Hall, A. (2016). Fundamentals of nursing.
Raingruber, B. (2016). Contemporary health promotion in nursing practice.
Taylor, B., Kermode, S., & Roberts, K. (2007). Research in nursing and health care. Melbourne, Vic.: Thomson.
