Strategies for maintenance of health-promoting behaviors.

With our understanding of health expanding to include a dynamic of well-being, definitions of health vary, and activities associated with health promotion and disease prevention often overlap. Consequently, studies of health-promotion research include risk reduction. Most nursing studies are descriptive and cross-sectional, and although other disciplines report more intervention efforts, the same theoretic, definitional, and measurement issues exist in all studies. Women, older adults, and those better educated report a greater number of health-promoting behaviors and engage in a healthier lifestyle. An individual's view of health may affect his or her motivation to perform health-promoting behaviors. Removal of barriers, creation of supportive environments, and a strong sense of self-efficacy are important aspects of adoption and maintenance of health-promoting behaviors. Development of self-efficacy should be an integral part of health-promotion programs as increases in self-efficacy have been shown to precede the adoption and maintenance of health-promoting behaviors. Goal setting, contracting, and other behavioral techniques can help an individual develop competence in self-regulation of behavior. Outcomes of research must be congruent with the long-range view that promotion of health implies. Short-term outcomes may continue to be specific, but longer-term indicators will be more comprehensive. Measurement difficulties include evaluation of large-scale programs over extended periods, accounting for positive change in samples in which some persons already maintain health-promoting behaviors and proxy measures for future health. Future attention must be directed toward promoting healthy lifestyles and development of "wellness" thinking.

Study of hope in patients with critical burn injuries.

The purpose of this study was to determine which factors patients with critical burn injuries would identify as affecting their feelings of hope; specific attention was given to the influence of nursing actions on these feelings. The nonprobability purposive sample consisted of nine white male patients who had been admitted to a large burn center in the Southwest. Content analysis technique was used to determine the nursing behaviors that influenced the patients' levels of hope. Hope in this study is viewed as a dynamic process with past, present, and future dimensions. The majority of factors that subjects identified as affecting their levels of hope evolved from the present dimension. This study indicates that factors that affected each subject's level of hope were contingent upon where the patient was in the psychological recovery process that occurs after burn injury. Accordingly, the efficacy of specific nursing actions is contingent upon consideration of these same factors.