Progress for Patients: The Role of Nurses In Health Promotion by 30Seconds Mom

Despite nurses playing a huge role in our lives, we often forget nurses do more than just care for us when we’re sick or injured. A considerable portion of their work concerns health promotion; in other words, helping us – individually and collectively – increase our health and well-being. No easy feat.

Let’s examine the role nurses play in health promotion.

What Is Health Promotion?

Health promotion happens when you enable people to improve and better control their health. Its core goal is good and lasting health, a basic right for everyone. Health promotion happens at every health care level, from one-on-one patient care to community advocacy to government policy.

Health promotion goes beyond telling people how to be healthy. Health promotion recognizes the immense influence social factors – such as your upbringing, your socioeconomic status and your social support networks – have on your health and seeks to address the health inequities these factors cause.

How does health promotion work? In a practical sense, it develops strategies and sets of actions to build good health and well-being.

5 Ways Nurses Contribute to Patient Health Promotion

Just as health promotion exists at every level of health care, so do nurses. Their contribution is a significant reason for the continued success of health promotion. Here are some of the ways nurses contribute:

1. Preventative Care

Once upon a time, the health-care industry’s focus was to cure disease, not prevent it. Today, the focus has shifted more toward prevention. The reason is simple: when you provide preventative care, you’re giving your patients agency to make necessary health changes themselves, the essence of health promotion.

Another reason for this focus shift is logistics. Despite the size of the U.S. health-care industry, its resources are finite. Only so many hospital beds and health-care professionals exist to go around. The COVID pandemic – though unique in size and impact – showed us what happens when demand for treatment greatly outweighs treatment supply. When nurses effectively encourage and promote preventative care, such as keeping up to date with vaccinations, it may reduce the chance of this lopsided outcome.

2. Patient Education

Effective health promotion is rooted in comprehensive and continued patient education. Without it, the likelihood of patients being readmitted for the same issue increases.

As a nurse, your educational contribution can be as small as outlining to your patient their medication routine or as large as developing a health and well-being plan for your patient to activate at home. Either way, your patient education must be clear, concise and honest; anything less and you risk ambiguity and misinterpretation.

A nurse who excels in patient education possesses two critical soft skills: highly developed communication and stakeholder management skills. These skills enable nurses to collect and distribute critical information in a prompt and accessible manner.

3. Routine Health Screenings

Responsible patient education starts with routine health screenings. Think mammograms, diabetes screenings and blood pressure checks. Again, it’s about empowering your patients to take control of their health. The benefits are more than physical; simply keeping to a screening routine can have a significant positive effect on a person’s mental health.

As a nurse, your key objective is to promote disease literacy. If your patient has a family history of melanoma and you’ve encouraged regular skin cancer checks, the next step is providing them advice and information on how they can prevent matters from getting worse. Suggesting they wear sunscreen daily might seem like a small piece of advice; acting on that advice can prove the opposite in a big way.

4. Building Patient Trust

A factor critical to your health promotion efficacy will be your ability to build patient trust. When a nurse establishes trust with their patient, it significantly increases their ability to help determine the root cause of any issue. Relying solely on your patient’s physical health will only tell you half their story; the rest of the story will come when they trust you enough to reveal it.

Trust isn’t always a matter of suspicion on the patient’s behalf. If your patient comes from a community that speaks English as a second language, their reluctance to build trust may stem from their lack of confidence in speaking English. This is where your soft skills shine; compassion and attentive listening will help you connect with your patient.

5. Patient-Specific Recommendations

With trust established, you can get to the heart of your patient’s matters. This is true health promotion in action. Patient-specific recommendations take a holistic approach to patient care, considering direct and indirect factors and shaping care and advice accordingly.

3 Ways Nurses Contribute to Community Health Promotion

Step back from the health promotion you offer your patients and you’ll see the wider community you belong to. This is a bigger-picture health promotion; less about individual support (though this is still critical) and more about the actions an entire community can take to improve collective health and well-being.

Online MSN FNP programs are ideal for this career path as they enable you to become certified in specialist skills and help care for each member of a family at every stage of their life.

1. Health Promotion In Schools

Fewer environments prove better for health promotion than schools, given the educational benefits these places already provide for the community. An effective school-health campaign fits seamlessly into an existing curriculum; for students, it’s just another lesson wedged between English and Math.

2. Advocacy

Health promotion advocacy comes in many forms. Everything from helping a patient’s family interact with a health-care provider to developing public-health campaigns to engaging with local, state and federal government to contribute positively to any health-care policy changes.

3. Medical Research

A less direct but no less critical contribution to health promotion. For example, participating in research on the impact of health-care policies will give you a deeper understanding of the challenges you face in promoting effective health and well-being for your community.

The key takeaway with health promotion? It’s a game that plays out in the short term and long term. Today, your goal might be a quick diagnosis so that your patient can start working toward a healthier future; tomorrow, it might be advocating for policy changes that enable positive health outcomes for the community you support.

It’s a game that prizes an agile and inclusive mindset. The more open you are to shifting priorities in healthcare and connecting and empowering diverse patient communities, the more effective a nurse you will be.

Note: The content on 30Seconds.com is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and should not be considered medical advice. The information on this site should not be used to diagnose or treat a health problem or disease, and is not a substitute for professional care. Always consult your personal healthcare provider. The opinions or views expressed on 30Seconds.com do not necessarily represent those of 30Seconds or any of its employees, corporate partners or affiliates.

Take 30 seconds and join the 30Seconds community, and follow us on Facebook to get inspiration in your newsfeed daily. Food, fun, health, happiness.