Chapter 2: Health Promotion in the Context of Health Assessment & Chapter 3: A Relational Approach to Cultural and Social Considerations in Health Assessment

primary prevention

whereby people and populations are prevented from becoming ill, sick, or injured in the first place.

secondary prevention

early detection of disease, before symptoms emerge

tertiary prevention

as the prevention of complications when a condition or disease is present or has progressed.

Health promotion

as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), is “the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve their health.”

Determinants of Health

as outlined by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) include the following elements:

• income and social status

• employment/working conditions

• education and literacy

• childhood experiences

• physical environments

• social supports and coping skills

• healthy behaviours

• access to health services

• biology and genetic endowment

• gender

• culture

• race/racism.

Active immunization

The use of either vaccines or toxoid preparations elicits an immunological self-response within the host body that provides protection at a later exposure date.

passive immunization

In some instances, antibodies are administered in the form of immune globulin to people who have already been exposed to a disease.

Vaccine Hesitancy

The delay or refusal of vaccines, despite availability.

relational approach

guides you to enter all nursing situations— including health assessment—as an inquirer, inquiring into the experiences of people (including ourselves), how people understand their health and well-being, how they manage given their current and evolving states of health and/or illness and contexts, and how the health of people and your care are shaped in relation to wider contexts, including health care.

intrapersonal

(within each person, including yourself and people to whom you are providing care)

interpersonal

(between and among people, including family members, colleagues)

hermeneutic phenomenological lens

a lens to focus on meaning and interpretation

critical lens

a lens to focus on power

societal structures

are set up to impact people’s health and well-being in different ways and how power operates in our society to shape people’s life experiences, health, and well-being.

structural conditions

is relevant to conducting health assessments because understanding both a person’s health and their responses to health care in context will help you to be more accurate and convey less judgement of people in your assessments.

structural analysis

takes into account the broader socio- economic and political contexts of people’s lives—prompting us to pay attention to, for example, how systems of long-term care, the lack of affordable housing in Canada, significant income inequities, and other structural influences impact peoples’ health.

gender filter

helps you consider how gender pervasively influences peoples’ health, access to care, and health care delivery.

decolonizing filter

draws attention to the history or social conditions and to who has been and continues to be marginalized by colonialism, neocolonialism, and racism in our society and who is advantaged by these dynamics.

Marginalized

is used to point to the social, economic, and political structures and conditions in our society that contribute to social, health, and health care inequities and to the disproportionate effects of inequities on particular segments of the population.

Health inequities

refers to differences in the distribution of health outcomes between population groups that are unnecessary, avoidable, unfair, and unjust.

Poverty

is the primary cause of poor health among Canadians.

discrimination

“a socially structured and sanctioned phenomenon, justified by ideology and expressed in interactions among and between individuals and institutions that maintains privileges for members of dominant groups at the cost of deprivation for others”

racial discrimination

being enacted on the basis of racism

Racialization

refers to the social process by which people are labeled according to particular physical characteristics or presumed ethnocultural or “racial” categories and then treated in accordance with misinformed beliefs related to those labels.

Indigenous peoples

refers to the original inhabitants of the land.

immigrant

is a person who has been granted the right to live in Canada permanently by immigration authorities.

Structural competency

refers to clinical training for nurses, doctors, and other health care providers that pays attention to the economic, political, and social conditions that produce health inequities.