Health Promotion

Traditionally healthcare in the United States has been focused on treating illness and curative care. However, in recent years a transition to preventing illnesses and disease through health promotion has taken ahold of the healthcare system. Health promotion is defined as “the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health” (Giddens, 2013 P. 406). Health cannot be built in a day, nor can disease be prevented by an intervention that occurs once in our lifetime; thus the act of health promotion requires individuals to adopt a lifestyle change that focuses on health living practices and behavior changes. There are three levels of disease prevention, primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary prevention (which

There are a variety of programs built into the system that entice patients to partake in health promoting activities. For example there are community resources that provide preventative care, including but not limited to, nutritional counseling, exercise classes, and immunizations, to those covered by Medicare and even to those with no insurance. Their balance is determined on a sliding scale based on income level. This encourages those with low socioeconomic standing to take an upstream approach to their health that otherwise they may not have been able to do. The focus of this paper is the idea of preconception nutrition as a health promoting

Birth defects such as neural tube defects are highly preventable with the right education and care. Nurses can make strides in reducing the amount of children born with neural tube defects (17% of all newborns) in a number of different ways. Whatever method nurses choose to relay information related to preconception nutrition and its effect on pregnancy outcomes may and will vary, but by placing interventions at all levels of the bioecological model we can expect to see real improvements to occur in this area of healthcare. The systems do not exist exclusively, but simultaneously—there are complex relationships between the microsystem and the exosystem in this representation of the model. If nurses expect the education they do with the family unit on nutrition they must also ensure that the family has the financial ability to purchase those food items. That is where community food assistance programs come into play. A relationship also exists between the mesosystem and the macrosystem. Nurses that come to visit in the school setting to present the idea of preconception nutrition can also get the students connected with the social media sites discussed above. Overlap and interplay of the systems and nursing interventions provides nurses with a stronger ability to impact and improve the health outcomes of many pregnancies across