Nursing students' attitudes to health promotion to: Implications for teaching practice

SummaryFor several decades now the World Health Organization has indicated the need for a reorientation of the health services away from focusing solely on illness and disease to one that considers both disease prevention and health promotion. Successive publications that guide public health policy both nationally and internationally reiterate the need for health promotion and the principles of health for all to become integral to the fabric of health care delivery. The role of the nurse as health promoters is well recognized. However despite acknowledgement by professional nursing bodies and nurse educators that health promotion forms a central tenet of undergraduate nurse education curricula, there are varied approaches to teaching and learning and little formal evaluation of the consequences of approaches taken. The aims of this study are to identify current health promotion curricular content within the Irish undergraduate nursing programme context; to measure nursing students' attitudes towards health promotion and to examine nursing students' reported lifestyle behaviours.