Nurses and health professionals engage in health promotion, providing the population with learning opportunities to improve health literacy and engage in behaviors beneficial to individual and community health. The process of improving the health literacy of a patient, community, or nation is called health education. Health education plays vital role in maintaining the population’s wellbeing because it provides the foundation for promoting healthy living and allows preventative measures. Health education and promotion are essential for the healthcare system because there are plenty of health hazards in the modern world that medical professionals cannot address without the population’s active participation.
Developing a population’s health education relies on the process of nursing professionals’ interactions with patients. For example, Sharma (2021) explains that “the primary purpose of health education is to influence antecedents of behaviors – awareness, information, knowledge, skills, beliefs, attitudes, and values – so that healthy behaviors develop” (p. 5). The author also underlined the importance of these behaviors facilitated naturally, without coercion. Nurses are in a prime position to promote health through education due to their professional knowledge from their background and practice and their unique relationship with their patients. They provide patients with care and stress relief, meaning they are able to influence their attitude and mindset when it comes to their health.
Nurses also have to address local and contemporary issues within a community or globally. For example, a large issue affecting many people around the world is the addiction to substances such as alcohol or narcotics. Thus, health education programs can address this problem by educating the population about the negative aspects of addiction, such as the effect it has on the mental health of the addicts and their families. The nurses’ activities in addressing the issue as a part of the health education plan would primarily focus on informing the patients about the issue. Next, the activities include providing information about methods of safe withdrawal from addictions and sharing preventative techniques to reduce the possibility of relapse.
Reference
Sharma, M. (2021). Theoretical foundations of health education and health promotion. Jones & Bartlett Learning.