• Subject Name : Nursing

Principles of Primary Health Care

Introduction to Effective Approaches to Health Promotion

Primary health care refers to the initial level care for persons, families and society with proper healthcare system. Primary health care involves the whole society and approach towards total health promotion (World Health Organization,2020). Health promotion practices enables individual to improve their health and control over health problems. Health promotion increases the quality life of all human beings and improves global health status (Hubley &, Copeman 2018). Primary health care and health promotion activities go parallel to each other as illness prevention programs are equally important with focus on patient care. Medical treatment of critical diseases through trained nursing facility is important to prevent further damage to health. Rheumatic heart disease considered as a major threat to community health in both developed and under developed countries. The role of nurses in critical health care is well discussed in this essay topic and the importance of proper nursing management in rheumatic heart disease. This essay will demonstrate that nurses of Ottawa accept the core challenge to prevent and control the global threat of rheumatic heart disease.

Role of Nurses in Health Promotion

In common practice, the role of nurses involve treatment of sick people, care of family health, child health nursing, encourage healthy ageing, illness prevention, rehabilitation and community development, problem solving for patients and advocacy of research and education for primary health care. The relevance of these nursing roles will depend upon the nature of illness, nursing context and position responsibility. In general nursing practices health care promotion played an important role in promoting healthy behavior and providing accurate information to the people about adopting healthy lifestyle. Health promotion activities engage nurses to manage and improve person’s health and equip patients with correct guidance to gain ultimate control on health. The critical role of nurses regarding health promotion involves disease prevention and act as an educator with the patients about medications and immunization. Beside this, it helps to decrease premature deaths among young adults due to several life threatening conditions.

Rheumatic heart disease is a serious health condition caused due to rheumatic fever. The rheumatic fever occurs when scarlet fever or strep throat is inadequately treated. Also, rheumatic fever is known as an inflammatory disease that cause permanent heart damage, affect brain, joints and skin of patients. Early diagnosis of throat infection and timely treatment with prescribed antibiotics may prevent serious effects of rheumatic fever. The health condition of rheumatic heart disease involves inflamed heart valves that forcing harder the heart to pump the blood resulted to scarred heart valves. The health complication related to rheumatic heart disease (RHD) includes heart failure, ruptured valves of heart, bacterial endocarditis and complications in pregnancy due to serious heart ailments. Moreover, RHD can be prevented with proper health care promotion activities in the community and provide non-medical precautions for control of rheumatic heart disease among peoples from poor socio-economic background. RHD identified as a significant threat for person living in poverty conditions including young children and adults. Equally, this chronic condition accesses the health of poor people background and increases the chances of premature deaths due to poor health situation of underdeveloped countries. Health promotion practice carried out by trained and professional nurses spreads awareness in health education of rheumatic fever and reduces the burden of RHD. Research shows that knowledge about rheumatic heart disease increases understanding about the serious consequences of rheumatic heart disease in the young population and establishment of Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion advocates health educators and nurses to promote awareness for RHD. WHO conducts health and welfare promotion activities in under privilege countries and support the primary health care facilities to offer additional community health care nurses to educate about rheumatic heart disease.

The role of nurses in managing and controlling RHD is important to assess the signs and early symptoms of rheumatic heart disease (Phillips, 2019). The nurse should be alert at all time and check for sudden complaints of chest pain, palpitations and pericardial tightness. The role of nurses in RHD care is to notice about any chances of second degree cardiac attack due to rheumatic heart disease. Furthermore, the nurses must keep close watch on irregular breathing pattern, unconsciousness level and use of masculine activities. The important subjective data that nurses must collect from rheumatic heart disease patients are past medical history, family history of any rheumatic fever, recent strep throat infection, active physical activities of patient and any nutritional metabolic disorder of patient (Golinowska et al., 2016). The nursing intervention is important in taking care of RHD patients with proper administration of penicillin therapy to minimize the chances of further heart damage. Give prescribed NSAIDS by medical practitioner to suppress any rheumatic activities. The main responsibility of nurses is to notice the effectiveness of antibiotic therapy on patients and take necessary records of improvements. Besides that, nurses can provide assistance in health survey in schools to detect early causes of rheumatic fever. For treatment of carditis it may continued for more than 10 years and severe heart disease patients need lifelong medication treatment and nursing support (Mitchell et al., 2019).

The primary responsibility of health care nurses is to proper treatment to give proper treatment to sick patients (Stigler et al., 2016). In the same way,, primary health care nurses may asses nursing requirements for ill patients, timely medication, taking correct samples, writing records, organising workloads and monitoring critical patient’s pulses, blood pressure and temperature. One of the important roles of nurses in promoting health and prevention of critical disease is to act as an educator (Lopez‐Dicastillo et al., 2020). Incidentally, nurses can also use their professional settings and Ottawa charter structure to inform and guide young people about healthy community policy to improve health of common people.

A global milestone in health promotion segment established with the Ottawa charter for health promotion. In order to reach the complete state of physical, psychological and social well being, a person or community must identify the benefits of health and aspire to change unhealthy behaviour to cope with the surroundings (Mitchell et al., 2019). The Ottawa charter recognizes basic features of health promotion activities including food, shelter, education, peace, and income, stability in resources, social equality and justice. The first international conference on promoting health organized by WHO in Ottawa,(Canada) 1986, The Ottawa charter for health promotion international agreement is signed in that international conference. After that series of health practices launched in international health platform and many national and international governments come forward to achieve the public health objective of “Health For All” by year 2000 and also beyond that year for good health promotion (Hubley &, Copeman 2018). The basic strategies of Ottawa charter for health promotion are advocate, enable and mediate.

Five important health action strategies of Ottawa charter are-

  • Building better healthy policy for public
  • Establishing supportive environment
  • Strengthening healthy action for community
  • Developing skills and knowledge in field of health
  • Re-directing primary health care services to promote health and prevent critical illness

The role of nurses in promoting above strategies of Ottawa charter for health promotion is very important to discuss because through these strategies nurses helps to build supportive environment for public health9 (Hubley &, Copeman 2018). The participant nurses advocate the current public health policy and give commitment towards equality in health sector (Lopez‐Dicastillo et al., 2020). The community nursing provides prompt response to the health and knowledge gap within community people and tackles all in-equalities developed by political practices. The nurses acknowledge the people as a main source of health and provide adequate support to enable themselves and their families about self well-being and healthy living conditions. Lastly, recognizing the health maintenance challenges involved in health promotion is vital to address each ecological and health related issues.

Conclusion on Effective Approaches to Health Promotion

The discussion presented in this essay paper concludes that the primary health care providers are needs of everyday life. Whether it is general nursing or critical nursing practices the role of nurses is very important to determine the health prospective of the community people. To empower and enable the individual, their families and society about multispectral policies of health promotion, proper health care approach is needed. It is concluded that Health promotion practices requires proper guidelines to follow by primary health acre providers to deliver better education on health promotion (World Health Organization,2020). The Ottawa charter for health promotion established by WHO in first international conference, states that community health givers, nurses, doctors are always available to provide critical health services. The five action strategies of Ottawa charter incorporate several perspectives of health promotion. All in all, it is truly said that if all perspectives of Ottawa charter will be directed towards health promotion then many complex issues may get solved. Finally, role of nursing practices will be correctly implemented so that critical ill patients may get ultimate and rewarding medical treatment ( Stigler et al., 2016). 

References for Effective Approaches to Health Promotion

World Health Organization. (2020). Hearts: technical package for cardiovascular disease management in primary health care.

Stigler, F. L., Macinko, J., Pettigrew, L. M., Kumar, R., & Van Weel, C. (2016). No universal health coverage without primary health care. The Lancet387(10030), 1811.

Phillips, A. (2019). Effective approaches to health promotion in nursing practice. Nursing Standard.

Lopez‐Dicastillo, O., Zabaleta‐del‐Olmo, E., Mujika, A., Antoñanzas‐Baztán, E., Hernantes, N., & Pumar‐Méndez, M. J. (2020). “Missed nursing care” in health promotion: Raising awareness. Journal of Nursing Management.

Hubley, J., & Copeman, J. (2018). Practical health promotion. John Wiley & Sons.

Golinowska, S., Groot, W., Baji, P., & Pavlova, M. (2016). Health promotion targeting older people.

Yu, E., Malik, V. S., & Hu, F. B. (2018). Cardiovascular disease prevention by diet modification: JACC health promotion series. Journal of the American College of Cardiology72(8), 914-926.

Saggi, M., & Kalia, R. (2020). Rheumatic Fever and Rheumatic Heart Disease. Asian Journal of Nursing Education and Research10(3), 360-364.

Mitchell, A. G., Belton, S., Johnston, V., Gondarra, W., & Ralph, A. P. (2019). “That Heart Sickness”: Young Aboriginal People’s Understanding of Rheumatic Fever. Medical anthropology38(1), 1-14.

Watkins, D. A., Johnson, C. O., Colquhoun, S. M., Karthikeyan, G., Beaton, A., Bukhman, G., ... & Nascimento, B. R. (2017). Global, regional, and national burden of rheumatic heart disease, 1990–2015. New England Journal of Medicine377(8), 713-722.

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