The Health Promotion paper involves doing something you’ve always done as a nurse or nursing student — providing client teaching, in other words, promoting health education. In whatever area you work, you have been assessing patients/clients and their families or significant others, identifying important issues (in most health care environments this means ‘problems’), planning care, completing interventions, and determining whether anything you did, helped. What this paper involves is different only in setting and focus. In this project, you need to:
1. Select an individual from the community.
2. With your client, and using Gordon’s Functional Health Patterns, assess his/her health holistically.
3. From this information, develop a health promotion/learning plan based on the individual’s expressed desire to learn something about health, wellness, illness, or an anticipated developmental change such as growing up or growing older.
The person may be of any age from a child to an older adult. For many of you who have spent your careers to date working with ill populations in hospitals, this paper may constitute a departure from illness-focused assessments and care. Remember to refer to the involved Functional Health Patterns (FHPs) – only the ones applicable to your client. What interventions/actions can be identified that will improve the client’s health?
References Be sure to support the Health Promotion paper with references. For example: perhaps you and your client decide to help them with a weight-loss program. How would you go about it? What tools or ‘props’ would you use? What journal articles or other references would you use in the preparation of your education process with the client, maybe learning and the older adult? This paper is about your client and identifying her/his need – not about the diagnosis or the medications the client is taking
The tool you will be completing for the assessment and collection of data uses Gordon’s Functional Health Patterns (FHP). This information is NOT to be submitted as part of your Health Promotion paper. Your completion of this assessment is for your use only. However, you are expected to include the 2-3 FHPs that are most relevant to your client’s specific needs. For example, if the client states they are having difficulty with bowel movements, you might review all the patterns pertaining to this possible issue (nutrition, elimination, activity/exercise, etc.), plus any other patterns that might impact on this concern. These specific patterns must be included in your Project
General Description of the Health Promotion Paper (Please refer to the Evaluation Criteria below.)
• You will need to gather articles/literature on the topic in addition to your course readings and incorporate them into your paper (at least 8 references need to be used). These references MUST be from peer-reviewed sources such as articles in nursing journals or publications by professional organizations such as the Canadian Nurses Association, Health Canada, and the Public Health Agency of Canada, for example. You have access to thousands of journal articles via your StFX online library that you can access from anywhere, and you may have access to print-based journals in hospital libraries, community health centers, etc. in your home community. Unless you are writing from a historical perspective, use references that are no more than 5 years since publication (2017).
Your course text is not to be considered as one of your references, but you may certainly use it and add it to your list of references.
• Do not use sources that are not peer-reviewed. Websites such as Wikipedia, or WebMD or blogs, for example, have not been subjected to review by a panel of experts and are not appropriate for academic papers. Similarly, newspaper clippings and popular literature such as Chatelaine magazine are also not usually peer-reviewed and are therefore not appropriate. • APA 7th edition (2020) format and referencing is required.
• The paper should be 10 pages maximum in length, the introduction, conclusion, 6 pages of text, and reference page(s).Layout of the Health Promotion Paper:
1. Introduction: (half to one page) the paper should begin with an introduction to the topic that outlines the purpose and scope of your paper. In outlining the scope, you will identify what your paper will include. Provide a brief description of your client and why the particular topic was MUTUALLY selected by you both. In other words, discuss why your client has the particular issue or concern and why they would like some education about it. Plan about 2 paragraphsfor your introduction.
See example below: Ms. S. is a 14-year-old adolescent recently diagnosed with unstable juvenile diabetes. (JD) Ms. S. must learn how to inject insulin. However, she is very reluctant to do so but doesn’t want her parents involved either. In the introduction you might talk about JD, its implications on the future health of the young person and outline potential problems the young lady may incur over the years.
2. Content of the paper: (6 pages): Give this section a title (not ‘content of the paper’) that will reflect what you are going to talk about. (It is a level 2 heading). Identify a health promotion or learning topic that you either want to learn about (through your readings), or that has relevance to you in your current practice. In this example, you would locate articles on the teaching of insulin injection, or how to approach a 14-year-old who feels she is “invincible” and doesn’t need insulin…especially to have needles or to check her glucose several times a day.
Remember that you want to emphasize the role of the nurse in health promotion/learning. Include a discussion about the resources and opportunities you have identified, as well as problems and challenges in assisting your client. Incorporate highlights from what you have read into the content of the paper to support your discussion.
3. Conclusion: (half to one page) (level 2 heading) Evaluate how your client responds to the information presented. Was the information helpful? (met her/his needs; was rejected and if so…why?). Do you feel you were able to satisfy the client’s need for learning and health promotion or do you feel there was still some aspect of information that you could not cover with the client or could not identify? Plan about 2 paragraphs for your conclusion. What did your client think about the Health Promotion paper you developed?
