Health Promoting Nursing Essay

Promoting Healthy Eating Habits To Prevent Obesity In School-Aged Children

Introduction

This essay aims to discuss the significance of nurses in encouraging eating rights to prevail over obesity among school-going kids. Overweight and obesity during childhood are also emerging concerns that threaten the young institution’s present and future health. In the first step, health and well-being are explained, and general overviews of health promotion and disease prevention in later life are provided. It will then briefly justify focusing on healthy eating, and explain how the development of a health promotion resource, for example, a poster to be sent to the children and families, will occur. Noting that the nurse shares with child specialists the access to both children and parents or caregivers of those children, this discussion drives home the point that each interaction of a patient holds the potential to be significant in creating positive change or in changing the course of a child’s life. Using communication, leadership and health promotion strategies, the essay will also describe how nurses can influence the required changes in children’s dietary behaviours.

Discussion of the Process Used to Develop the Resource

Concept of Health and Wellbeing

Health and wellness are nothing more than complex and constantly evolving notions that build upon the traditional medical model and include such areas as mental, social, and physical. The WHO formulated the definition of health in 1948 it was the absence of disease, and it came up with a new concept defining health as a state of physical, mental, and social well-being. People’s health depends on such factors as their surroundings, heredity, and behaviour (World Health Organization, 2024). Optimal health, on the flip side, is commonly described as an individual’s state of internal and external health, that is, the state of an individual and or his/her well-being. It implies that people should sustain positive practices in their course of life, to attain sound minds and healthy bodies.

Van Druten et al. (2022) explained that there are multiple paradigms that focus on different components of people’s health. For instance, the biomedical model concentrates on human physical health, while the psychosocial model takes into consideration the health conditions influenced by environmental factors, social relations, and mental conditions. These ideas when interrelated, point to the continuous processes of health and wellness, influenced by distinct features of the environment, social context, and hidden worlds. This broader view promotes working towards multi-dimensional and all-encompassing health enhancement interventions that target both the psycho-social and the physical domains.

Principles of Health Promotion

Concepts of health promotion suggest that individuals and communities need to take specific actions to change certain behaviours and involve strategies that prevent diseases, educate people and protect supportive structures. Approaches like exercise, understanding mental disorders, and encouraging good nutrition are vital for intervention and the enhancement of health in a person’s lifetime (Youth, 2023). Moreover, Lillefjell and Maass (2022) note that this principle involves such elements as empowering, participation, the unity of the approach, equity, intersectoral collaboration, sustainability, and the use of multiple strategies.

According to the World Health Organization (2022), health promotion operates on five levels: For personal development, there is skill building, for creating supportive environments there is community capacity, for public health policy there is policy development, and for altering the health services, there is service development. This is because the determinants of health are known by the nurses and the major objective of nursing is to ensure that people live healthy lives, avoid diseases, develop and improve the quality of people’s lives and the population’s duration.

Rationale for Resource Choice

The rationale for the choice of developing a poster that encourages the adoption of a healthy diet arises from research on the use of visuals in changing people’s behaviour, especially the young clientele in school. This poster entails simple information and is well-designed hence would be easy for the students to read and develop new healthy eating habits (Zhang et al., 2020).

Campaigns like the UK’s “Change4Life” and the School Food Standards also show how there is a requirement for bright and attractive picture-based materials to urge children towards healthier eating. These programs emphasize preventive measures for possible obesity as early as elementary school to increase consciousness among children (NHS, 2022). These initiatives have been envisaged while creating the poster so that it may serve as a powerful tool for health education and preliminary reference to curb obesity among kids and as part of the subsequent school health promotion campaigns and interventions further helping to enhance and promote widespread health goals.

Nurse's Role in Health Promotion

Health education is closely connected to nurses because they are essential element of health in the framework of a patient’s lifetime. As it is supposed to foster heathy eating behaviour among school-going children, nurses ensure that both the children and their families understand the best ways of observing healthy standards as well as combating obesity. The following are some of the attributes of both child health and well-developed nurseries; They offer planned nutrition and dietary requirements, safety precaution measures, medical administration, and immunization, among other things while offering care to the child. Hardworking nurses dedicate their every effort to counter diseases associated with obesity that include, stroke, diabetes, obstructive pulmonary disease, and heart diseases (Colorado Technical University, 2023). Nursing skills help in the assessment of patients’ risks factors and health concerns, which allows the patients to receive individualized guidance for the improvement of their health.

Health promotion is prioritized throughout care and on each contact made by the nurse with the patient. They incorporate research-confirmed methodologies and health promotion frameworks, for instance, the Health Belief Model and Tannahill’s Model. Health literacy encompasses a nurse’s task of promoting change and supportive factors that foster eh. Change practice models focuses on supporting patients to embrace behaviours that secure healthy lifestyle such as exercising, quitting smoking, and having a balanced diet (Cheng et al. , 2020).

They are also involved in communicating with various health models and policies that focus on promoting communal health and dealing with modifiers of health. They are not restricted to the basic function of offering care to patients but enhance the community’s health by informing, working with other healthcare professionals, and engaging in health promotion activities. Such measures help the nurses in disease prevention, for example fighting obesity, and in the promotion of heathly eating among the school children.

Steps in Resource Development

In the fifth activity, I created a resources list and budget, reviewing realistic costs associated with tangible items and people. The sixth step entails reviewing the applicability of the foregoing cross cutting functions of a health promoting school for the model in putting into practice healthy prevention, protection and education that has underpinned the content of the poster to eliminate obesity in school going children. This is the action plan to complete the poster: An action plan to complete the poster is to create the graphic design of the content, research and identify the layout that best presents the information and test the poster to the target group and alter needed. Lastly, comes implementation; the continuation of the feedback collection process to gain ideas on how to strengthen the poster.

Design Considerations

When producing the posters, organizing the content became my main concern, as I focused on the appropriate title, easily understandable illustrative materials and using the children’s favourite colors. The content developed was aligned to the WHO health promotion principles while being culturally sensitive about each student’s background. The format underscores the main points on healthful foods, which is useful with regard to increasing the nutritional literacy of children who are in school.

Application of Health Promotion Strategies

Critical Discussion of Strategies

Concerning health promotion strategies, theories, and approaches towards obesity prevention among school-aged children relative to appropriate nutrition, the following have been utilized critically. Thereby, Tannahill’s Model of Health Promotion adequately addresses the promotion of health, prevention, and health protection with a specific focus on childhood obesity health education (Ekenedo, 2023). The health education, and the prevention component attempt to remove the risks that accompany obesity, while the health protection will ensure that; the environments that support healthy lifestyles are observed.

Another important instrument in this regard is the Health Belief Model (HBM), which is a behavioural change theory used to examine beliefs concerning selected behaviours, in this case, dietary choices (Midjani et al., 2023). From the tenets of the HBM, where perceived barriers, benefits, and cues to action were distinguished as major predictors of behaviour, the model can be effectively applied for directing the further study and alteration of children’s eating patterns. It also helps in realizing factors that can either promote or inhibit the promotion of a healthy diet, which in turn enables nutritionists and health facilities to intervene with an aim of enhancing dietary practices.

Moreover, the concept of the Making Every Contact Count (MECC) is applied to support healthy eating cues within hospital encounters with healthcare personnel (Turner et al., 2023). This approach facilitates interaction with the children and their families, thus enabling the nurses to refer to health knowledge and positively influence the clients’ behaviours. This means that MECC integrates health promotion into routine working encounters hence each working encounter contributes to the goal of promoting healthier eating patterns.

Leadership Skills

They indicate that proper leadership was essential in the successful implementation of the campaign on diet and the fight against obesity in school-going children. Specifically, in this particular health promotion activity, I was also assigned the position of the lead nurse and thus, I had to manage the project from its inception to implementation. This included establishing the objectives, work specifications, responsibility distribution, and coordination from the management to the Caseworker. In a participatory approach, I involved all the participants in most of the decisions that were required during the course of the campaign.

We also found that the responsibilities of managing the deliverables of the campaigns that embrace the resources development and interactions with the communities required considerable time and organizational skills (Addis et al., 2023). I also pay much attention to business interpersonal skills to report clearly the progress, issues, recommendations, as well as the solutions to both, the team and the target. Because of the positive environment that I created, I was able to motivate the team towards the completion of the campaign goals and objectives. I also was able to be as fluid as possible when it came to fixing problems and altering the course of the campaign as needed. This ordeal was an informative experience that pointed out that skills like critical analysis, effective communication, and collaboration with other people are functional in attaining the goals on health promotion.

Stakeholder Involvement

Since the campaign targeted school helpings-aged children, stakeholders’ participation was a strong point leading to the achievement of the campaign goals. They involved various stakeholders ranging from principals, teachers, parents, medical practitioners, and other members of the community, and members of various community organizations provided useful feedback to the strategy as well as in the day-to-day decision-making on the same. Their involvement made the campaign more interesting and useful which increased its success and effectiveness.

Investigations from the school administrators and teachers helped in identifying students’ daily schedules and the practices aimed at regulating food intake in the school cafeteria (Bastida et al., 2023). Parents attended structured workshops and information sessions about nutrition education, whereby they were knowledgeable about how to adopt appropriate measures to encourage the consumption of nutritious foods at home.

Permission was sought and received from Nutrition specialists and Pediatricians to help fine-tune the visual and written content to the messages created; to create useful and accurate slogans. Further, other schools, businesses, and other community affiliates opened the floor to promote the campaign outside the school environment thus creating parity in the campaign for healthy eating for everyone in the community (Drouka et al., 2023). This proved to be a remarkably successful strategy as it laid down the groundwork for establishing the necessary support from all related stakeholders to ensure a long-term campaign for improving children’s diet and general health.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the involvement of the school staff, parents, healthcare providers and any other interested community organizations was essential for the relevance of the campaign and its outcomes. The Health Belief Model (HBM) and Tannahill’s Model were thus used as guidelines to ensure an approach that was more encompassing and adapted from education, prevention, and behavioural modification point of view according to the target population. Operating with the MECC strategy enabled a constant reinforcement of the messages that promoted healthy eating and thus retained the focus on proper eating.

Recommendation

• A more extensive campaign would imply the formation of more activities for students and their parents as well as based on the school programme.
• It is also necessary to introduce the regulations of checking the outcomes of the strategies and giving feedback periodically. This should involve the use of real-time data and the community needs that are being faced on a real-time basis to enhance the process.

Addressing childhood obesity is crucial, and school nurses play a key role in promoting healthy eating habits. By creating educational resources and utilizing health promotion models, nurses can encourage lasting dietary changes in school-aged children. This essay provides an insightful approach to combating obesity, focusing on effective health promotion strategies. For tailored guidance on impactful health promotion nursing essay assignment writing, visit our assignment help to get expert assistance.

References

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