Health values最新文献

How can nursing students learn to utilize ethics, morals, and values in their everyday nursing practice? This article describes an innovative instructional approach, the Jurisprudential Inquiry Model. This model will establish a process of ethical decision-making that can be used in solving ethical dilemmas encountered in professional nursing practice. The Jurisprudential Model provides a developmental framework for the analysis of ethical issues in nursing practice through infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old-age.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate changes in aerobic fitness among female participants in a hospital-based wellness program. Subjects were divided retrospectively into control (n = 5) and experimental (n = 17) groups, based on their frequency of exercise during a supervised exercise program. The control group exercised less than two days a week, the experimental group exercised two to four days a week. Body weight, percent body fat, and estimated maximal oxygen consumption (VO2 max) were assessed before and after 6- to 12-months of individually prescribed exercise. Pre- and post-test results were analyzed with paired t tests. In the experimental group, body weight and percent body fat remained unchanged (P greater than .05) whereas estimated VO2 max increased significantly (P less than .05). No changes (P greater than .05) were observed in the control group. These results demonstrated that regular participation in a supervised exercise program can effectively increase aerobic fitness.

An essential element in the preparation of aspiring health care professionals is the internship experience. It is usually identified, by student and professionals alike, as the single most important aspect of training. The selection of any agency which provides such a vital function, however, can be confusing. There are thousands of different community health agencies which are specifically concerned with a particular aspect of human health for some designated subset of the general population. These agencies range from the well known giants like the World Health Organization, the American Cancer Society, and the National Institutes of Health, to the less well know but equally important agencies like Compassionate Friends and the National Atoxia Foundation. The purpose of this article is to identify a classification system that will organize the seemingly disparate health care industry. It is hoped that this system will enable users, such as aspiring young professionals seeking field placement or employment, or local consumers seeking assistance for a health problem, to distinguish among the plethora of agencies, institutions, and organizations concerned with health/medical care and make intelligent choices concerning their selection and utilization.

A convenience sample of 206 inner city department of public health patients were asked to rank the importance of health care services relative to other problems they face. Respondents spontaneously ranked money, unemployment, and housing as their most pressing concerns. When presented with a list of potential problems, housing, crime, and rent were most frequently cited. Health of children and own health were priorities for 15 and 21 respondents respectively. Pregnancy prevention and having a good pregnancy were important for seven individuals. The priorities attached by these medically and socially high risk people for maternal and child health services are placed in the context of published data on expert opinion on need for maternal and child health services and the availability of these services. The results of this survey suggest that public health administrators define realistic, specific goals for preventive maternal and child health services. Aggressive consumer education programs aimed at providing information on the importance of these services to maintaining well-being are also in order.

To increase significantly the amount and duration of behavior change in health education risk reduction programs, a multi-dimensional approach is needed. The family system in which each individual functions has a unique impact on an individual's probability of change. The authors propose that risk reduction programs include family therapists as primary change agents and suggest that multiple family therapy is the most effective strategy for reducing long-term change. This model may be applied and adapted to meet the characteristics and needs of most health education risk reduction programs. Given the prevalence of heart disease and cancer, the problems of bringing about risk reduction behavior change have been paramount in the health care community. Attrition rates and recidivism, however, have plagued risk reduction programs. It is proposed that by including family therapists in these programs, personal and family issues may be hindering and/or sabotaging attempted behavior change could be resolved, thus facilitating greater success.

Health care professionals are recognizing the need to treat their patients not only as individuals, but as part of a social network--the family. In order for health care organizations to provide a total family care program and, therefore, a more efficient and effective health care delivery system, they must develop and implement strategies to identify and treat all of the patient's needs--psychological, biological, and familial. Coordination among individual departments and personnel is critical to ensuring that resources meet these needs. The trend toward total patient and family services will continue to be emphasized and refined by the leaders in the health care industry.

A brief background on the status of microcomputer-based health education programs is presented. Within the current context, the authors propose a series of 13 questions arranged in hierarchical fashion to evaluate microcomputer-based health education. The value of this approach is that technically flawed programs can be screened out and important health education concerns can be integrated into an evaluation of software.

Health promotion internships are an essential link between the university classroom and the corporate or public service environment. A well structured internship experience will provide the future health promotion professional with an opportunity to transfer learned theory into practical application within a controlled and supervised environment. The success of the internship experience is contingent upon the mutual effort of the student, academic institution, and sponsoring organization working together to develop a model that will reflect the goals and objectives of each group with primary long-term benefit accruing to the future health promotion professional. The purpose of this article is to explore the components of a successful health promotion internship model developed from the perspective of a sponsoring organization.

If health counseling is to continue to emerge as a unique specialization, a health counseling curriculum needs to be identified. Few health education or counselor education programs currently have the faculty and program resources to independently train health counselors. As a result, an interdisciplinary approach to the preparation of health counselors is advocated. This article describes a 45-semester-hour interdisciplinary master's degree offered by the Health Education and Counselor Education Programs at the University of Arkansas, Fayeteville, Arkansas designed to prepare health counselors.

In order to examine seniors' efforts to change their health practices, nearly all (N = 198) of the senior citizens who reside in the small rural town of Willsboro, New York were interviewed. Subjects were asked to describe their health change efforts of the prior year. Subjects also rated the success of a principal lifestyle change effort. The vast majority of these seniors (83%) reported having attempted one or more lifestyle change efforts. It was determined that a little less than one half (45%) of the key lifestyle changes were sustained for 6 months or more. The impact of social environment was assessed through measures of perceived social support and perceived health-related social norms. Self-report measures of health behavior, depression, memory loss, activity limitations, and socioeconomic status served as controls. Two structural equation models determined that social norms are related to both the number of lifestyle change attempts and to lifestyle change success. An interaction between norms help to determine whether social support is positively or negatively related to the number of lifestyle change attempts.