The Nurse's Role in School-Based Mental Health Promotion: Easing the Transition Into Adolescence

The developmental phase of adolescence is a critical transition that can be influenced by many factors. The author identifies some of the significant mental health problems for the "high-risk" adolescent. The importance of the Student Assistance Program and the role that the psychiatric/mental health nurse specialist plays in the context of this program are reviewed.     

Health Maintenance,Health Promotion: Is There a Difference?

Nurses in community settings are seeing more health care consumers who are medically stable and who are asking for assistance in areas such as exercise, stress reduction, nutrition, and illness and accident prevention. These requests can be characterized as concerns of health maintenance or health promotion. Two nursing diagnoses, altered health maintenance and health-seeking behaviors (specify), enable the practitioner to address these concerns in clinically useful ways. Through case studies and comparative tables, the differences between these two diagnoses is clarified to enable nurses to identify, treat, and evaluate efforts made to enhance health-oriented behaviors.     

Public Health Nursing in Japan: New Opportunities for Health Promotion

Major changes are taking place in public health nursing in Japan. These include significant developments in employment, education, and roles of public health nurses (PHNs). Demographic and economic factors have prompted the Japanese government to focus health service delivery on community-based care, particularly for the growing elderly population. Public health nurses are redefining their roles and are assuming important functions in planning, implementing, and evaluating community health programs for the elderly. Japanese PHNs are using a variety of health promotion strategies to initiate change at the local level. This article presents two case studies to highlight the leadership role of PHNs in creating new services that foster healthy communities.     

Screening for Psychosocial Distress: Implications for Prevention and Health Promotion

The importance of identifying the mental as well as physical health needs of individuals served in primary care settings has been documented in the United States, Great Britain, and developing countries. This study compared the prevalence of psychosocial distress across four demographically diverse ambulatory care clinics, and described the relationship among selected demographic characteristics (age, gender, marital status, race, education, and income) and psychosocial distress in order to develop a profile of high-risk clinics and patients. The sample was drawn from consecutive clinic attendees in two geographic regions of the United States. Psychosocial distress was measured with the Goldberg 28-item general health questionnaire (GHQ). As a group, 64% of the subjects had GHQ scores of less than 5, indicating they were not at risk; 26.5% were moderately distressed and 9.5% were highly distressed. The distressed tended to be chronically physically ill patients who attended two clinics. Multivariate nominal scale analysis (NMA) indicated that the sociodemographic variables accounted for 11% of the variance in GHQ scores. Younger (less than 60 yrs), white, low-socioeconomic subjects had a higher probability of falling into the high-risk category. Contrary to previous research findings, gender was not associated with distress.     

Building Community Capacity for Health Promotion: A Challenge for Public Health Nurses

Abstract The centennial celebration of public health nursing is a strong reminder of the tradition and practice of public health nursing's commitment to communities. Partnerships with communities give public health nurses fiduciary responsibility to be actively involved in public health reform to advance health promotion and health protection. Public health nurses must rise to the challenge to build community capacity through facilitating community participation, enhancing community health services, and coordinating public policy to achieve core public health responsibilities of assessment, policy, and assurance. This paper explicates strategies for building community capacity for health promotion.     

Health Promotion, Education, Counseling, and Coordination in Primary Health Care Nursing

The evolution of advanced nursing practice over the past several decades has stimulated a number of studies of the activities of nurses specializing in the area of primary health care. These studies have ignored the nursing component of nurse practitioners' role in the areas of health care coordination, health promotion, health education, and counseling. We examined the extent to which nurse practitioners reported involvement in these areas in their practices. Study findings pointed to a high frequency of health-promotion activities, with 98 percent of the respondents reporting this type of care delivered during the reporting day, including health screening, nutrition information, exercise counseling, family planning, education, and risk factor analysis. The most common coordination activities were referrals for mental health, social work or drug rehabilitation, vision services, alcohol problems, and hearing services. Overall, study results supported the assertion that nurse practitioners considered that they provide their clients with a wide array of coordination, health-promotion, health-education, and counseling services within a nursing framework.     

Exploring Nursing Outcomes for Health Promotion

The author examines nursing outcomes in relation to the aspect of nursing that deals with health promotion. The focus is on identifying factors that influence nursing outcomes and outcome selection, health promotion in the context of today's nursing practice, and the impovtance of nurses articulating their unique contribution to health promotion. The author also discusses measurement challenges inherent in outcome evaluation, and suggests future directions for enhancing outcome evaluation in health promotion.     

Historic and Future Health Promotion Contexts for Nursing

Purpose: Health promotion in the United States has been narrowly defined focusing primarily on individual behaviors, risk factors, and lifestyle. This article traces the historic and conceptual roots of health promotion care in the United States and critically examines the direction nurses have taken in health promotion.
Scope: Health promotion care in Western ideology emphasizes the value of individuals and the importance of personal responsibility for success or failure.
Conclusions: Health promotion nursing interventions, based on the tenets of individual choice and knowledge, restrict the range of interventions. The complex nature of health promotion requires that nurses consider the economic, sociopolitical, and cultural context in which health care takes place. Recommendations are made for an expanded nursing role in health promotion, one that is consistent with nursing's underlying contextual focus and concern with environments.     

Allocation of Healthcare Resources: The Case for Health Promotion

The issue of healthcare resource allocation is examined from the macro perspective with the view to building a case for health promotion and prevention. The author suggests a health promotion framework as an alternative, or at least a complementary approach, to resource allocation, with the potential, over the long term, to slow the growth of healthcare costs. Supportive and opposing arguments are presented for the case of health promotion. The author concludes with a synthesis of a new perspective for nursing in the struggle to allocate healthcare resources in a fair and just manner.     

Health Promotion Disciplines and Diversity

Health Promotion Disciplines and Diversity by Robin Bunton & Gordon MacDonald Managing the Changes in Health Care edited by K Teasdale Wolfe Communication Skills for Professional Nurses by M P Pagano & S L Ragar Study Skills for Nurses by Jayne Taylor Understanding Dementia 2nd edn by Alan Jacques Handbook of Practice Nursing by Monica Tettersell, Joan Sawyer & Chris Salisbury Doing Qualitative Research edited by B F Crabtree & W L Miller Nursing Care The Challenge to Change edited by M Jolley & G Brykczyńska Edward Arnold The ECG Made Easy 4th edn by JR Hampton Nursing at Burford A Story of Change by Alan Pearson Treating Sexual Distress Integrative Systems Therapy by Jane DiVita Woody A Textbook of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing edited by Julia I Brooking, Susan A H Ritter & Ben L Thomas