NRS 420 Benchmark – Human Experience Across the Health-Illness Continuum

Sample Answer

Nurses and other healthcare providers are crucial in promoting optimum health outcomes for their populations. They utilize their knowledge, skills, and experience to implement patient-centered, prioritized care interventions.

Understanding the health-illness continuum enables them to develop care plans that respond to their patient’s actual and potential needs. Therefore, this essay explores the concept of the health-illness continuum and its importance to nursing and the promotion of value and dignity in the care process.

It also focuses on a reflection about my health in the health continuum, resources, and options that I need to achieve my desired health outcomes.
Health-Illness Continuum and its Importance to Health and Human Experience when Caring for Patients

Health-illness continuum is a model used to describe an individual’s health status. The model asserts that one’s health moves from a state of health to illness and back to health again. The health status is rarely constant.

The health status moves from high-level wellness, good health, normal health, and illness to death(Frimpong et al., 2023). Adaptation is important to facilitate the movement of health from illness to health, with death occurring if adaptation does not occur.

Health-illness continuum is important to consider in relation to health and the human experience when caring for patients. Nurses and other healthcare providers use the understanding of this model to evaluate the health status and plan patient care needs.

The determination of the patient’s health in the model determines the severity of the health needs of a patient. The understanding also helps ensure holistic care in nursing practice. The model shows that health and well-being are products of interaction between different variables(Nunnery, 2023; Tomczyket al., 2023).

As a result, the adopted care interventions should not only focus on the disease but also on other influencing factors such as mental status, social support, and available community resources.

The health-illness continuum also expands the understanding that health is more than physical health. The person’s movement from a state of health to ill health shows that wellness depends on other factors such as growth, education, and awareness about their health needs and meeting them.

The understanding also shapes patient’s understanding of their health problems. For example, developing patient-centered care plans empowers patients to be proactively involved in meeting their health needs(Black, 2019). Therefore, the nurses’ role in healthcare is broad to ensure health promotion, disease prevention, and management.

How Understanding Health-Illness Continuum Promotes Value and Dignity

Understanding the health-illness continuum enables healthcare providers to promote the value and dignity of individuals and groups and to serve others in ways that promote human flourishing and are consistent with the Christian worldview.

Health-illness continuum considers the importance of considering all the factors that influence one’s health. They include social, psychological, cultural, physical, and spiritual factors that interact to influence a patient’s health.

The consideration ensures the delivery of dignified care to patients, irrespective of their backgrounds(Swanson et al., 2019). In addition, providers are aware of the positive and negative effects of the adopted interventions, hence, the promotion of the Christian worldview.

Health-illness continuum requires providers to respect the patient’s values, beliefs, and preferences. Healthcare providers must ensure that the adopted decisions prioritize the patient’s values for patient-centered care. In doing this, they not only promote dignified care but also ensure flourishing health.

The model also raises providers’ awareness about the crucial roles of strategies such as health education to improve patient outcomes(Black, 2019). Healthcare providers emphasize the importance of health promotion interventions such as health education and screening for timely disease management, empowerment, and optimizing care outcomes.

The health-illness continuum also influences the provider’s adoption of care approaches that would promote dignity, value, and the Christian worldview. For example, nurses are encouraged to promote holism in their care, which enhances care outcomes.

Holistic care addresses the multiple patient care needs such as social, spiritual, and physical, which in turn promote adaptation among the affected and those at risk. The understanding also strengthens nurses’ dedication to protecting patient autonomy(Tomczyk et al., 2023). Nurses protect patient autonomy by ensuring their involvement in the care process, thereby, dignity and promoting the Christian worldview.

Reflection

My overall health status in the health-illness continuum is good health. I am currently free from physical and psychological health. However, my health can shift from good health to illness and back to good health based on my environmental interactions and experiences. Several behaviors support my health and well-being.

They include eating a healthy diet, engaging in active physical activity, avoiding substance use and abuse, and utilizing social support from friends and families. Active physical activity minimizes my risk of developing health problems such as obesity, overweight, and hypertension.

Social support from friends and families helps reduce the impact of stressors on our lives. Some of the behaviors that will detract from my health and well-being include unhealthy lifestyles such as lack of physical activity, unhealthy diet, and engaging in risky behaviors such as alcohol use and abuse.

Resources

I have several resources that can help me to move towards wellness in the health-illness spectrum. One of the resources that I have is access to educational materials that I can use to change my lifestyle and behaviors. I can access educational resources such as journals, books, and websites such as the CDC to learn more about how to improve my health and wellness.

The other resource is social support. I have adequate social support from my friends and family. I rely on my friends and family to overcome stressors in my life. I am assured of their social, emotional, and psychological support whenever I experience a challenge.

The other resource that I have is my extensive knowledge about health problems. I use the knowledge to make informed decisions about my choices in life. The resources would help me to move towards wellness. For example, access to educational resources such as journals will help me understand evidence-based interventions to promote my health.

My social support will help me cope with stressors in my life. Lastly, knowledge about different conditions will influence my lifestyle and behavioral decisions such as engaging in active physical activity and eating a healthy diet.

Conclusion

The health-illness continuum is an important model that influences healthcare providers’ understanding of patient health and their experiences with care. The understanding of the health-illness continuum enables healthcare providers to promote the value and dignity of individuals in the care process.

It also enables them to provide care that promotes human flourishing that is consistent with the Christian worldview. My health status in the health-illness continuum is good health. I have resources that I will utilize to move toward on health-illness spectrum.

References

• Black, B. (2019). Professional Nursing E-Book Concepts & Challenges. Elsevier Health Sciences.
  Frimpong, S., Sunindijo, R. Y., Wang, C. C., Boadu, E. F., &Dansoh, A. (2023).A Conceptual Framework to Promote the Transition to Positive Mental Health among Young Construction Workers.Buildings, 13(4), Article 4. https //doi.org/10.3390/buildings13041025
  
• Nunnery, R. K. (2023).Advancing Your Career Concepts of Professional Nursing. F.A. Davis.
  Swanson, C., Thompson, A., Valentz, R., Doerner, L., &Jezek, K. (2019). Theory of Nursing for the Whole Person A Distinctly Scriptural Framework. Journal of Christian Nursing, 36(4), 222. https //doi.org/10.1097/CNJ.0000000000000656
  
• Tomczyk, S., Schlick, S., Gansler, T., McLaren, T., Muehlan, H., Peter, L.-J., Schomerus, G., & Schmidt, S. (2023). Continuum beliefs of mental illness A systematic review of measures. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 58(1), 1–16. https //doi.org/10.1007/s00127-022-02345-4