NRS 434 Health Illness Continuum Discussion
Benchmark – Human Experience Across the Health-Illness Continuum
The Health-illness continuum, sometimes called the wellness-illness continuum, illustrates the concept of wellbeing, including mental and emotional aspects of health. It was first described in 1972 by a physician, Dr. John W. Travis. Some items of literature refer to this continuum simply as the healthcare continuum. Graphically, this continuum’s main paradigms include optimal wellness, neutral point, illness, or even death.
Nurses apply the concepts from the healthcare continuum to manage and care for their patients. Towards the right of the continuum, patients’ condition improves as they strive to achieve wellness. Moving towards the left direction means that the patient’s health deteriorates and the chances of loss of life are likely. Nursing care, therefore, revolves around pushing the patients’ condition towards the right-hand side direction in the continuum.
Importance of Understanding Health-Illness Continuum in My Care Provision
Definition of health varies with various perspectives. The client’s understanding of health and illness may be discrete such that the delineation of optimal health from illness is identifiable. From my perspective, health and illness exist in a continuum such that the absence of illness does not necessarily mean health. This understanding is relevant to my care provision because all patient care services that I would provide must be targeted towards moving the patient health status towards the right of the continuum.
In the current digital society, clients have access to health and health-related information from various sources alongside care professionals’ advice (Hilty, Turvey & Hwang, 2018). However, the authenticity of this information cannot be ascertained. The application of this information to their lifestyles is vital in health promotion and maintenance. It is, therefore, my role as a nursing care provider to sieve this kind of information so that the patient applies the appropriate information to appropriate health practices.
The understanding of the factors that influence health is critical in deciding the kind of care that care professionals give to the clients. The knowledge on determinants of health is essential not only to healthcare providers but also to the patients. Typically, the public perceives the nurse as the promoter of life and healing in care provision. However, our roles and responsibilities go beyond health promotion. Alongside health promotion, I, as a nurse, should promote illness prevention at the individual and community or group levels.
Nursing interventions, therefore, target patients at all stages of the health-illness continuum and aim at moving all of them towards the optimal health direction. Therefore, the promotion of human dignity and value restoration is the overall endpoint intention of nursing care. Nurses can make this possible through modification of the physical environment, mental health and thought processes, and the social ways of life (Svalastog et al., 2017).
Overall State of Health Reflection
The status of a person in the wellness-illness continuum is a labile situation that is not fixed in any of the paradigms. The shifts in paradigms are influenced by external or intrinsic factors, or both. However, the absence of illness does not suggest wellness (Rovesti et al., 2018). The balance between wellness and illness is therefore indeterminate. The shift from optimal health, neutral point, to illness and back is not unidirectional and therefore reversible. However, the end-of-life situations are mostly irreversible and can only be sustained palliatively.
My current overall status of health oscillates in between optimal health and neutral point. My behaviors and lifestyle majorly determine my given position in the continuum. Social behaviors such as occasional beverages, alcoholic or nonalcoholic, intake predispose my status to shift to the left of the continuum. Whatever, we do for fun, pleasure, or recreation is to some extent responsible for disease in our lifetime. Illness is in most cases determined by the presence of disease symptoms and signs. Occult etiologies in disease pathogenesis exist in almost everyone but cannot be used to classify them as ill.
Options and Resources Available for Health Sustenance
Health maintenance and promotion are products of timely health prevention. Prevention of health progression towards the left of the continuum or the illness side helps in sustaining quality human health. Noteworthy is that prevention resources tend to vary extensively depending on the stage of prevention. Primary prevention targets individuals with optimal health and neutral point. This is the group where I belong.
Resources for primary prevention include behavior change, adequate health education, immunizations, and safe health practices. This type of prevention works well for this group because they are at risk of acquiring ill-health involving preventable conditions at some point in their lives. Secondary prevention resources are appropriate for exposed individuals who may have developed ill-health but have not been ascertained yet. For this group, screening is required to identify the problem and prevent further progression in the illness direction of the health-illness continuum.
Conclusion
The Health-illness continuum is a model used by clinicians to explain, describe and provide care to their clients. The health status of an individual may change at any time depending on extrinsic and intrinsic influencers of health. For this reason, timely prevention is the main resource to improve the negative paradigm shift in the continuum of healthcare. As a nurse, I not only endeavor to provide quality health and wellness guidance to my patients, but I also aspire to lead a life that guarantees me good health.
References
- Hilty, D.M., Turvey, C. & Hwang, T. (2018). Lifelong Learning for Clinical Practice: How to Leverage Technology for Telebehavioral Health Care and Digital Continuing Medical Education. Current Psychiatry Reports, 20(15). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-018-0878-y
- Rovesti, M., Fioranelli, M., Petrelli, P., Satolli, F., Roccia, M. G., Gianfaldoni, S., Tchernev, G., Wollina, U., Lotti, J., Feliciani, C., & Lotti, T. (2018). Health and illness in history, science and society. Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences, 6(1), 163–165. https://doi.org/10.3889/oamjms.2018.056
- Svalastog, A. L., Donev, D., Kristoffersen, N. J., & Gajović, S. (2017). Concepts and definitions of health and health-related values in the knowledge landscapes of the digital society. Croatian Medical Journal, 58(6), 431–435. https://doi.org/10.3325/cmj.2017.58.431
