Selected Family Health Promotion Assessment and Initiative Essay

Selected Family Health Promotion Assessment and Initiative - Essay Example Health promotion impacts positively on health literacy centering on health related knowledge, attitudes, motivation, confidence; behavioral intentions; and, personal skills relating to healthy lifestyles. The central purpose of this paper is to examine the concepts of health and learning as outlined by the McGill model of Nursing. In light of family partnership, I visited a family three times in which I adequately familiarized with the family’s health goals and concerns, their present strengths, coping strategies, and resource utilization. Selected Family Health Promotion Assessment and Initiative Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 Background and Aims Health promotion refers to the process of enabling individuals to exercise control over their health and its determinants. Health promotion seeks to create an environment that is essential for the making of informed choices. Health promotion approaches include early intervention and prevention such as primary health screening and survei llance; identification of opportunities to facilitate and support healthy lifestyles choices; understanding and application of the determinants of health encompassing aspects such as societal influences on the health of individuals (Allen & Warner, 2002). Effective health promotion requires gathering of enough information regarding the identified health issue. The underpinning issues in health promotion activities include individual beliefs, knowledge and attitudes centering on the health issue (Friedman, Bowden, & Jones, 2003). This factor in inspired by the manner in which an individual thinks, which renders him/her susceptible to developing the health problem. The McGill model of nursing, whose salient features encompass health, family, collaboration, and learning was developed by F. Moyra Allen. The McGill model of nursing can be praised for its fluidity, flexibility, and functionality. The model core focus centers on health promotion, especially within the family. The goal of t he model is to bridge the gap evidenced by the absence of community resources that pursue the healthy development of families across their life span (Allen & Warner, 2002). Some of the assumptions of the model include every family has capabilities or health potential manifested by strengths, motivation, and resources that form the foundation of health promotion behavior, and the outcomes of health promotion hinges on competence in health behavior and enhanced health status. 1.2 Nature of the Home Visits The visit to David’s family was a referral made by a neighbor out of concern that the family was tackling various health issues. Since the visits are conducted at home, I had to decide the times that would be best to reach the target audiences, especially which the family members are likely to pay attention, act on the message, or find the messages more engaging. This situation meant that I must pay close attention to providing explanations for the initial phone call, and avai l an opportunity for the family to accept or reject the visit. Prior to the introductory meeting with the family, I had to prepare adequately beforehand to ensure that the meeting was successful. I made the phone call to the family and requested a home visit and expressed my desire to meet up with the whole family. The family in question was a single family comprising of a father, David, and his two teenage daughters, Natalie and Millie. I came to learn later that

Therapeutic Recreation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Therapeutic Recreation - Essay Example Suffering, it is thought, is reducible through objective solutions to health problems. The author believed naively that one day, every known problem to medicine would be addressed by an objective fix—which is a belief now breaking up in all areas of medical treatment. Unfortunately, the commitment to an objective, universal set of fixes is a false medical model for how things work in reality. Instead, the author believes human consciousness to be a tool of vast complexity to remember, contemplate, process, and think, which precludes a simplistic model of medicine. In contrast to the idea of suffering as an objective phenomenon with objective causes, the author points to extreme cases of hypochondriasis, in which a person’s suffering is entirely self-caused, and those who live with extreme levels of suffering, but overcome it to live joyfully. Given this wide range of how people deal with suffering, the author concludes that suffering transcends traditional medicine. Acc ordingly, â€Å"suffering is a spiritual experience, intensely personal, and full of paradox and mystery† (O’Keefe, 2008). At the other end of this spectrum is the idea of leisure, which is taken to be the opposite of suffering. In leisure, one finds joy with one’s activities, which is also a deeply personal and subjective issue. For both leisure and suffering, the author believes that â€Å"therapeutic recreation has a wonderful gift† appealing both to the suffering and the joyful in the whole human being. It is objectionable, according to the author, that therapeutic recreation is treated by some as a distraction from the apparent seriousness of a patient’s situation. A patient’s experience in a medical ward is full of objective news—good and bad—that ignores the suffering and leisure of the individual patient. An apparent implication of therapeutic recreation’s â€Å"diversion† from objectivity is the thought t hat therapeutic recreation does not know or care about the seriousness of a patient’s situation. This, in turn, leads to an attempt by some in the field to bring therapeutic recreation on par in objectivity to the medical field that specializes in problem-solving diagnoses. At this point, one can see the author take issue with the language being used in therapeutic recreation—language that is depersonalizing people and making it more difficult to understand suffering (and joy) at a humanistic level. The author predicts that patients will demand that the language being used is more accessible and humanistic: an idea that supports the theory saying therapeutic recreation should carve out a place for itself as a humanistic practice that acknowledges the spiritualistic aspects of human life. Suffering, after all, represents a very spiritual experience, given that it is represented as such in so many world religions as redemptive and necessary for meaning. Suffering, whethe r it is embodied in homelessness, oppression, poverty, starvation, or violence, affords an opportunity for experiencing emptiness (O’Keefe, 2008). From redemption and emptiness, human beings have the chance to experience the highest form of joy, which comes from giving oneself to a saving power (which, the author notes, is not necessarily religious â€Å"but certainly spiritual†). In addition, this suffering can be communal. Following the September 11th terrorist attacks, entire groups of people felt shared emotions. Some of these shared emotions were put at ease through