Assessment and Interventions for Health Promotion

Assessment and Interventions for Health Promotion

After completing this unit, you should be able to:

• Assess determinants of health for individuals and families.
• Develop a community health screening initiative based on a focused community need.

Course Outcome(s) practiced in this unit:

MN505-2: Apply theoretical and conceptual models of health related behavior and health promotion education to the individual, families and communities.

Interventions for Health Promotion

This unit focuses on the importance of interventions for health promotion, such as the use of preventative services consisting of screening tests. Screening tests detect health problems early and can enable the advance practice nurse to provide valuable preventative measures, health promotion, and health education to support the care of healthy individuals and populations.

Individual and Family Assessment for Health Promotion

One of the primary responsibility of master’s prepared registered nurse is to promote health, utilizing the processes and patterns that lead toward wellness. Understanding risk factors, exposures and the relationship to disease helps to determine cause effects and predictions. Masters prepared nurses use assessment strategies that address interactions among individuals’ biophysical, psychosocial, and spiritual states and patterns with the environment. The advanced nursing role requires data gathering through assessment. This data is relevant to the health promotion activity of the individual and their current health status. Assessment is key to identification of problems within the individual’s health and lifestyle pattern. Assessment is foundational to all other steps of diagnosing and planning of an individual or a family’s health status and in the promotion of health.

Community Interventions for Health Promotion

Evidence-based preventive services are effective in reducing death and disability, and are cost effective or even cost-saving. Preventative services consist of screening tests, counseling, immunizations, or medications used to prevent disease, detect health problems early, or provide people with the information they need to make good decisions about their health. Clinical and community preventive services are vital to health promotion and disease prevention. The master’s prepared registered nurse is an advocate for preventive services and equitable policies for at risk and vulnerable groups.

Screening is an important component of clinical preventative services because it helps the healthcare professional to identify chronic conditions and risk factors before the conditions become costly, both in financial terms and quality of life. Health education about screening is categorized as part of the rubric of primary prevention, but the actual process of screening is part of secondary prevention. The selection of a screenable population is as important as selection of a screenable disease, and is often based on incidence and prevalence. The main criterion used to define an appropriate population is the definitive presence of risk factors related to a disorder. This unit will require you perform a focused community health assessment and choose a condition or disease process for which to create a community health screening initiative, including why you have chosen the topic of screening.