Health Models and Concepts

• According to WHO, health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
• Health is the actualization of inherent and acquired human potential through goal-directed behavior, competent self-care, and satisfying relationships with others.
• Individual perceptions and definitions of health change with age and are affected by a person's health beliefs.

Models of Health and Illness

• Models help explain complex concepts such as health and illness and the relationships between these concepts and a patient's attitudes toward health behaviors.
• Clinical judgment helps to identify which model to use.
• Health beliefs are a person's ideas, convictions, and attitudes about health and illness.
• Positive health behaviors maintain, attain, or regain health and prevent illness.
• Negative health behaviors include practices that are harmful to health, such as smoking, drug or alcohol abuse, risky sexual behaviors, poor diet, and refusing to take necessary medications.

Health Belief Model (HBM)

• HBM addresses the relationship between a person's beliefs and behaviors, consisting of 3 components.
• Component 1: An individual's perception of susceptibility to an illness.
• Component 2: An individual's perception of the seriousness of the illness.
• Component 3: The likelihood that a person will take preventive action.
• The use of this model helps understand factors influencing patients' perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors to plan care and help patients maintain or restore health and prevent illness.

Health Promotion Model

• HPM defines health as a positive, dynamic state, not merely the absence of disease.
• The HPM describes the multidimensional nature of people as they interact within their environment to pursue health.
• The model focuses on 3 areas: individual characteristics and experiences, behavior-specific cognitions and affect, and behavioral outcome.
• Health-promoting behaviors result in improved health, enhanced functional ability, and a better quality of life at all stages of development.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

• Nurses use Maslow's, hierarchy to understand the interrelationships of basic human needs.
• According to this model, certain human needs are more basic than others, and some needs must be met before other needs.
• Self-actualization is the highest expression of one's individual potential and allows for continual self-discovery.
• Self-actualization includes morality, creativity, spontaneity, acceptance, experience, purpose, meaning, and inner potential.
• Self-esteem includes confidence, achievement, respect of others, and the need to be a unique individual.
• Love and belonging include friendship, family, intimacy, and a sense of connection.
• Safety and security include health, employment, property, and family and social ability.
• Physiological needs include breathing, food, water, shelter, clothing, and sleep.

Holistic Health Model

• The relationships among body, mind, and spirit affect a person's overall health.
• The Holistic Health Model of nursing promotes a patient's optimal level of health by considering the dynamic interactions among emotional, spiritual, social, cultural, and physical aspects of an individual's wellness.
• Choices powerfully affect health following the Holistic Health Model
• Some of the most widely used holistic interventions include meditation, music therapy, reminiscence, relaxation therapy, therapeutic touch, and guided imagery.

Variables Influencing Health & Health Beliefs and Practices

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

Internal Variables

• Include a person's developmental stage, intellectual background, perception of functioning, and emotional and spiritual factors.
• A person's perceptions of health, illness, and health behaviors change over time.
• Cognitive abilities also relate to a person's developmental stage.
• Perceptions of physical functioning affect people's health beliefs and practices.
• A patient's degree of stress, depression, or fear influences health beliefs and practices.
• Spirituality serves as an integrating theme in people's lives and often provides motivation to participate in health-promoting activities.

External Variables

• Influencing a person's health and beliefs and practices include family practices, psychosocial and socioeconomic factors, and cultural background.
• Health is determined by a person's circumstances and environment.
• Cultural background also influences beliefs about the causes of illness and remedies or practices to restore health.

Health Promotion, Wellness & Illness Prevention

• Public Health focuses on health promotion, wellness, and illness prevention.
• Health promotion helps individuals maintain or enhance their present health.
• Health promotion motivates people to engage in activities such as routine exercise and good nutrition to reach more stable levels of health.
• Health education includes providing information on topics like physical awareness, stress management, and self-responsibility to enable individuals to improve their health.
• Illness prevention includes activities such as immunization programs and blood pressure screenings to protect people from actual or potential risks to health and avoid declines in their level of health or functional ability.

Three Levels of Prevention

• Primary prevention is TRUE prevention and its goal is to reduce the incidence of disease.
• Primary prevention includes health education, nutritional programs, and physical fitness activities.
• Secondary prevention focuses on preventing the spread of disease, illness, or infection once it occurs, directing activities at diagnosis and prompt intervention.
• Tertiary prevention occurs when a defect or disability is permanent and irreversible, which involves minimizing the effects of long-term disease or disability by preventing complications and deterioration.

Primary Prevention examples

• Health education, good nutrition based on the developmental stage, provision of adequate housing, recreation and working conditions, marriage counseling, sex education, and genetic screening.
• Specific protections like providing immunizations, attention to personal hygiene, use of environmental sanitation, and protection from occupational hazards.
• Protection from accidents and carcinogens.

Secondary Prevention examples

• Early diagnosis and prompt treatment include individual and mass screening surveys.
• Focused examinations to cure and prevent diseases, prevent the spread of communicable diseases, prevent complications, limit disability, and prevent death.
• Disability limitations include adequate treatment to stop disease processes and prevent further complications.
• Provision of facilities to limit disability and prevent death.

Risk Factors

• A risk factor is any attribute, quality, environmental situation, or trait that increases the vulnerability of an individual or group to an illness or accident.
• Examples of risk factors include impaired gait, reduced vision, and lower extremity weakness.
• Non-modifiable risk factors such as age, gender, genetics, and family history cannot be changed, but are useful with assessment data and preferences.
• Modifiable behavioral risk factors include smoking, drinking alcohol, unhealthy diet, obesity, physical inactivity, and insufficient rest and sleep, which put people at risk for chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and heart disease.
• The physical environment can also increase the likelihood of certain illnesses.

Risk Factor Identification & Changing Health Behaviors

• Health risk appraisal forms help identify health threats based on the presence of various risk factors.
• Once risk factors are identified, health education and counseling can change or implement behaviors, that maintain health status.
• Nursing interventions that match the stage of change are most effective.

Illness

• Illness and disease are different concepts.
• Illness is a state in which a person's physical, emotional, intellectual, social, developmental, or spiritual functioning is diminished or impaired.
• Illness is a feeling of poor health.
• Disease is a medical condition that causes distress for a person because of its symptoms.

Acute and Chronic diseases

• Have the potential to affect many dimensions of functioning.
• Acute disease is usually reversible and has a short duration.
• Chronic disease usually lasts more than 6 months, is irreversible, and affects functioning in one or more systems.
• People often adopt cognitive, affective, and behavioral reactions to diseases are influenced by sociocultural and psychological factors.

Variables Influencing Illness and Illness Behavior

• Internal variables are a patient's perceptions of symptoms and the nature of the disease.
• External variables influencing a patient's illness behavior include the visibility of symptoms, social group, cultural background, economic variables, accessibility of the healthcare system, and social support.

Illness impact

• Behavioral and Emotional changes (short-term, non-life-threatening diseases usually require few changes in the functioning of a patient or family).

• Body Image (physical appearance)

• Impact on Self-Concept (mental self-image of all aspects of personality)

• Impact on Family Roles (role reversal is common when a family member is diagnosed)

• Impact on Family Dynamics (process by which a family functions, makes decisions, gives support to individual members, and copes with everyday changes and challenges)

• It is important to provide competent, quality, and safe care, nurses need to take care of themselves to ensure they remain healthy.

Explore key health models like the Health Belief Model and Health Promotion Model. Understand Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and its application in healthcare. Learn about factors influencing health perceptions and behaviors.