Introduction
Health is an important factor to achieve the appropriate quality of life, equal opportunities, and happiness. Health promotion strategies include many approaches such as behavior change and empowerment. Still, a nurse practitioner often meets challenges when using these strategies. Sometimes, a patient is not willing to change one’s life habits and remains unmotivated despite all the efforts of health care workers. There are also many ethical issues that a nurse encounters when teaching promotion strategies to one’s patients.
Conflict of Health Promotion Values
Although the interventions to improve people’s motivation in adopting healthy habits were rather successful over the past decade, there are still individuals whose interests and values conflict with the promoted ones. If such problem arises, a nurse should try to motivate a patient by explaining the benefits of leading a healthy lifestyle. Primarily, the reasons for a patient’s behavior should be detected. Some researchers note that “individuals reporting being amotivated toward health behaviors are unable to identify the reasons why they act, and tend to have low intentions and poor uptake and adherence to health behaviors” (Hardcastle et al., 2015, p. 835).
These people are in a group of high risk to get cancer and other hazardous diseases. Still, there are no distinct solutions how to address such individuals. One of the possible decisions is to explain in details how adopting healthy habits may impact the quality of life. Sometimes, lack of motivation is explained by insufficient efforts to change one’s behavior because it is recognized to be too hard or by an inability to overcome certain barriers due to lack of knowledge and will. Therefore, the appropriate information should be given to the patients to promote healthy habits. It is also believed that motivational interviewing is a successful approach to changing a patient’s behavior.
Ethical issues in Teaching Health Promotion Strategies
Some researchers state that “the problems we have seen with the behavior-change model can usually be handled by the empowerment approach” (Tengland, 2016, p. 38). When using such health promotion strategies as empowerment to control one’s quality of life, it is often crucial to remember that people’s privacy and right to make free choices should be respected. Still, empowerment influences social goals in achieving healthy behavior through mass media and specific laws. In nursing practice, it is more common to use approaches to achieve changes in a patient’s behavior.
Although sometimes a nurse might wish to manipulate a patient’s fears to achieve the goal, one should remember that it is not appropriate to use manipulation, even for the benefit of a patient. When a nurse encounters such ethical issues, some specific ethical decision-making process should be used. For example, this process can include identification of the problem, gathering additional information and developing different situations, making alternatives to these situations, implementing ethical decisions in practice, and evaluating the effects made by different health promotion strategies. For example, it is important to understand people and their motives from their standpoint to teach health behavior to them. It might also help a nurse to make a decision how to help a particular patient in achieving such goals as quitting smoking or increasing physical activity. Still, sometimes only the threat of approaching death can make a patient change one’s lifestyle.
Conclusion
The given paper discussed the situation when a patient’s values conflict the values of health behavior promotion. The approaches to solving this problem were identified. The challenge of ethical issues and ethical decision-making process was also described.
References
Hardcastle, S. J., Hancox, J., Hattar, A., Maxwell-Smith, C., Thøgersen-Ntoumani, C., & Hagger, M. S. (2015). Motivating the unmotivated: How can health behavior be changed in those unwilling to change? Frontiers in Psychology, 6(1), 835.
Tengland, P. A. (2016). Behavior change or empowerment: On the ethics of health-promotion goals. Health Care Analysis, 24(1), 24-46.