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How do you as a professional in the health care field define Health and how do you promote health in your practice???

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Whoa! Huge question. Can you narrow it down?

When I was in school we talked about a concept called "self actualization". I'm not sure I ever understood what that meant. But in general, health was a pre-requisite to fully being "human" in that sense. It involved a person's being able to freely mobilize all their (for lack of a better word) "energies" to interact with all realms of their environment: i.e., to be healthy means being in physiological homeostasis so that a human can meet his/her basic needs and influence his/her surrounding circumstances and events to their benefit. In addition, a human has to have emotional and psychological homeostasis to interact in his/her social and civic milieu.

Nursing then, is concerned with health and deviations from it. (In contrast to medicine that focuses on disease and it's treatment.) Nursing care aims at maximizing a patient's physical and emotional, strengths, (and where appropriate, their social systems) to better enable the patient to seek their own welfare and that of their significant others. And, at the end of human life, it is nursing's goal to support patients in their peaceful and dignified death.

Wow! I didn't realize I could still write this sort of BS. But... that's what we were taught and 35 years later it's as good as any other definition I've read.

Hope this helps.

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Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.

I know this question. We had it posed to us as nursing students 32 years ago. You need to answer this for yourself. That's the purpose of the assignment. You need to look at the definition of health and think about what it means to you. There is no right or wrong answer here. It is a question designed to make you do some thinking on this subject. Good luck.

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