Health Teaching And Promotion Essays Examples

Introduction

The ANA standards of nursing describe a competent and efficient level of nursing care. There are six primary standards of practice with each catering for a different aspect of nursing care. The fifth standard is titled "implementation" and is further subdivided into four subcomponents. In this paper, I will focus on the second subcomponent of the implementation standard, and this is known as health teaching and promotion. Through this standard, the registered nurse is required to employ strategies to promote health, as well as a safe environment. The nurse is supposed to provide health teaching that addresses various topics including healthy lifestyles, developmental needs, risk-reducing behaviors, daily living activities, and preventive self-care amongst others.
On a general level, the implementation standard is where the nurse implements a plan that has already been identified. Each plan must have an element of health teaching and promotion which is in itself a preventive strategy. Therefore, the standard of health teaching and promotion plays a very crucial role in nursing practice. It enables nurses to pass on the knowledge and information that they have gained both in school and through everyday work experiences to patients so that they can maintain a healthy status and possibly be safe from diseases or ailments. In practice, the nurses assess a situation and applies relevant health teaching and promotion methods that are also consistent with the patient’s beliefs, practices, values, learning needs, developmental level, culture socioeconomic status and language. The current nursing domain is characterized by highly advanced technology, and the nurse can use these to communicate health related information such as disease prevention to the patient across various settings. In addition, the patient is provided with information regarding the intended effects as well as the adverse effects of the various therapies and the patient can, therefore, make informed decisions when it comes to modes of intervention.
As a nurse working in a medical and surgical floor at a hospital, I have experienced and indeed utilized this standard firsthand. In one particular situation, a patient had been admitted because of chests pains and breathing problems. An x-ray revealed that is lungs had been partially damaged. The patient was a chain smoker, and this is what had probably caused the problem. I took it as my duty to educate this patient about the dangers of smoking. The patient was quite illiterate, and it took me some time to explain to him about the dangers of smoking. I engaged in an extensive health teaching and promotion process showing him how he could lead healthy lifestyle with the first step obviously being to quit smoking.
At another instance, a teenage boy was brought to the surgical room to have a blood clot removed. The boy had suffered from stroke previously, He was hugely overweight and I realized that he was leading a relatively unhealthy lifestyle that included overeating coupled with zero physical exercise. I engaged in an extensive health teaching and promotion endeavor with him where I educated him on healthy living habits, such a s eating healthy foods, engaging in regular physical exercise among others.

Conclusion

The standards of nursing practice have been incorporated into my academic program, and I have learned a lot regarding these practices including how I can incorporate them into my daily nursing practice. From my academic program, I have learnt about many theoretical scenarios where the standard of health teaching and promotion can come in handy and I have experienced some of these scenarios first hand as a nurse in medical and surgical floors. I plan to utilize what I have learnt in class regarding this standard into my daily nursing practice and in the future, I hope that this standard will be a key element of my overall nursing practice.

References

American Nurses Association. (2010). Nursing: Scope and standards of practice. Silver Spring, MD: Author.