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Addresses the nursing implications of mobilizing human strengths to achieve wellness. The human strengths presented in this graduate level health assessment course book are organized into nine resource categories, each with specific strengths, including: Meaning, Goals, Connections, Choice, Challenge, Confidence, Control, Capacity, and Capability.

Originally published : New York : William Morrow, c2006.

This book is a comprehensive resource for theory, research and action in health education and health promotion. The authors describe strategies and actions for health education and health promotion based on theories for understanding, predicting and changing behavioural, social and environmental determinants of health. The book also offers a conceptual framework for planning, evaluation and research and discusses ethical issues in health promotion. Health education and health promotion is addressed to bachelor and masters students, scholars, practitioners, policymakers and change managers. It offers a useful guide for a variety of professional and volunteer organisations and their workers, such as health service managers and environmental health officers, community nurses and dieticians, midwives and paediatricians, dentists, general practitioners, epidemiologists as well as psychologists, sociologists and social workers. This is a useful guide for all those who carry the field close to their heart and who are willing to invest in the promotion of health.

What are the goals of health promotion and the most apropriate means of achieving them? The prevailing view is that these goals are to prolong life and reduce mortality rates. Since the leading causes of morbidity and mortality are now largely attributable to lifestyle behaviors--smoking, diet, exercise, etc.--the means of achieving reductions in heart disease, cancer, strokes, diabetes and other chronic conditins are to identify more effective techniques for changing people's behavior. Virtually all health promotion research is currently directed towards accomplishing this objective. But at what cost? As researchers strive for more effective ways to change people's behavior, what are the implications for individual autonomy, integrity, and responsibility? Buchanan sets out to explain why a science of health promotion is neither imminent or estimable. He argues that health promotin is inescapably a moral and political endeavor and that goals more befitting the realization of human well-being are to promote self-knowledge, individual autonomy, integrity, and responsibility through putting into practice more democratic processes of self-direction and mutual support in civil society.