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• Health and wellness are the keys to healthy living.

Health

• The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
• Health involves realizing inherent and acquired human potential through goal-directed behavior, competent self-care, and satisfying relationships. (Pender, 2015)
• Individual health definitions evolve with age and are influenced by personal health beliefs.

Models of Health and Illness

• Models explain complex health and illness concepts and relationships with patient attitudes and health behaviors.
• Clinical judgement helps determine which model to employ.
• Health beliefs encompass a person's ideas, convictions, and attitudes towards health and illness.
• Positive health behaviors maintain, attain, or regain health and prevent illness.
• Negative health behaviors harm health, including smoking, drug or alcohol abuse, risky sexual behaviors, poor diet, and medication refusal.

Health Belief Model (HBM)

• HBM addresses the relationship between a person's beliefs and behaviors.
• HBM has three components:
  • Individual's perception of susceptibility to an illness.
  • Individual's perception of the seriousness of the illness.
  • Likelihood that a person will take preventive action.
• Using this model helps understand factors influencing patients' perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors to effectively help them maintain or restore health and prevent illness.

Health Promotion Model

• HPM defines health as a positive, dynamic state, not just the absence of disease.
• The HPM describes the multidimensional nature of people as they interact within their environment to pursue health.
• Three areas of focus:
  • Individual characteristics and experiences.
  • Behavior-specific cognitions and affect
  • Behavioral outcomes.
• Health-promoting behaviors improve health, functional ability, and life quality at all development stages.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

• Nurses apply Maslow's hierarchy to understand relationships between basic human needs.
• The model suggests certain human needs are more basic and must be met before others.
• Self-actualization is the highest expression of individual potential and fosters continual self-discovery.

Holistic Health Model

• Relations among mind, body, and spirit impact overall health.
• This nursing model promotes optimal patient health and integrates the emotional, spiritual, social, cultural, and physical aspects of individual wellness.
• Choices powerfully impact health.
• Widely used holistic interventions are meditation, music therapy, reminiscence, relaxation therapy, therapeutic touch, and guided therapy.

Variables Influencing Health & Health Beliefs and Practices

• Many variables influence a patient's health, health beliefs, and practices.
• These variables can be internal and external.

Internal Variables

• Include developmental stage, intellectual background, perception of functioning, and emotional and spiritual factors.

External Variables

• Factors like family practices, psychosocial and socioeconomic factors, and cultural background influence health beliefs and practices.
• Health beliefs often affect health behaviors or practices, which can positively or negatively affect a patient's health level.

Internal Variables Explained

• Development Stage: Health, illness, and behavior perceptions change through time.
• Intellectual Background: The way the individual perceives health, with cognitive capabilities relating to their individual developmental stage.
• Physical Functioning: Affect health beliefs and practices.
• Emotional Factors: Stress, depression and fears all can play a part.
• Spiritual Factors: Integrates theme in people lives and often provides motivation to participate in health promoting activities.

External Variables Explained

• Family practices influence how each member views health & illness
• Social Determinants of Health: Health depends on someone's circumstance and environment
• Culture: Influences patients' beliefs, customs, and values, influencing beliefs about illness causes as well as remedies

Health Promotion, Wellness & Illness Prevention

• Public Health focuses on health promotion, wellness, and illness prevention.
• Health promotion helps maintain or enhance health, motivating healthy activities like routine exercise and good nutrition for health stability.
• Health education provides information on physical awareness, stress management, and self-responsibility to improve individual health.
• Illness prevention include measures that protect from risks to health. These programs also help avoid declines in health.

Three Levels of Prevention

• Primary Prevention:
  • True prevention to reduce disease incidence through heath education, nutritional programs, and physical fitness activities.
• Secondary Prevention:
  • Targets the spread of illness/infection once contracted, while activities focus on diagnosis with interventions for reducing severity.
• Tertiary Intervention:
  • Occurs when defect or disability and irreversible, involving the minimization of long-term disease by interventions directed at preventing deterioration/complications.

Risk Factors

• A risk factor is any attribute, quality, environmental situation, or trait increasing vulnerability to illness or accident.
• Examples include impaired gait, reduced vision, and lower extremity weakness

Non-Modifiable Risk Factors

• Factors such as age, gender, genetics, and family history are non-modifiable.
• These risk factors must be considered along with the patient's preferences and data.

Modifiable Risk Factors

• Modifiable behavioral risk factors are smoking, drinking alcohol, unhealthy diet, obesity, physical inactivity, and insufficient sleep.
• These risk factors put at risk for illness like diabetes and heart disease.
• The physical environment can raise/lower the chances of an illness.

Risk Factor Identification & Changing Health Behaviors

• Health risk appraisal forms identify health threats based on various existing risk factors.
• When a patient's risk factors have been identified, health education and counseling is used to help change or implement behaviors to maintain/improve status.
• To be most effective, nursing interventions should match the stage of change.

Illness

• Illness and disease are different concepts.
• Illness:
• A state of impaired functioning (physical, emotional, intellectual and developmental).
• Disease:
  • A medical condition that causes distress for a person in the form of its symptoms.

Acute v Chronic Illness

• Both acute and chronic diseases have the potential to affect many dimensions of functioning.
  • Acute - usually reversible w/ short duration -- symptoms are intense and subside afterwards
  • Chronic - Lasts more than 6 months. Pt will fluctuate b/w maximal functioning and life-threatening relapses

Illness Behaviour

• People adopt behaviors influenced by sociocultural and psychological factors.

Variables Influencing Illness

• Internal variables are patient perceptions of ailments and the nature of a disease.
• External variables influencing illness include symptom visibility, culture, economic variables, access to system, and social support.

Impact of illness on Patient & Family

• Short term, non life-threatening diseases require fewer changes in functioning
• Impact on Body Image: Diseases/Illnesses result in physical appearance changes.
• Impact on self-concept: Self concept is a mental image of all aspects of someone's personality
• Impact on Family Roles: Family roles tend to change because of disease/illness
• Family dynamics - family functioning, decision making, supporting family members, and coping with challenges.

Caring For Yourself

• To give competent, quality, safe care, nurses must prioritize their own health.