New Health Promotion

The aim of this assignment is to discuss the importance of health promotion strategies in relation to the care of a patient with enduring mental illness. This assignment is focusing on an elderly patient in his eighties who is being treated for schizophrenia using the medication clozapine and a health promotion strategy.   This assignment will also be discussing the patient’s diabetes and smoking health promotion strategies to bring a more holistic approach.   For the sake of confidentiality, the patients name will be changed to Ross to comply with the Nursing and Midwifery Council guidelines on patient confidentiality (NMC, 2004).

Ross has been using the mental health services since the early fifties and has been an in-patient for the past twenty two years.   Ross was diagnosed with having paranoid-schizophrenia on his first admission and has been re-admitted several times since. He has become very institutionalised and dependent on staff and medication because of his regular periods in hospital. Ross is a very inpatient man which makes it difficult to get him to co-operate with any nursing interventions.   He has also been a smoker from an early age and gets irrational when he doesn’t have access to cigarettes. Ross was married for forty years before his wife passed away, leaving their only child as his next of kin.

Before discussing Ross’s health it is necessary to understand what health education and health promotion is and why it is important for the patient. Health promotion has been defined as "the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health to an optimal level" (department of health, 2001).   Optimal health is defined as a balance of physical, emotional, social, spiritual and mental health; which in many patients will mean a change in there lifestyle. Lifestyle change can be facilitated through a combination of three factors, which are to enhance awareness, change in behaviour and create enviroments that support good...