Analyzing Nurse's Role in Obesity Prevention via Ottawa Charter

This essay explores the pivotal role of nurses in obesity prevention, utilizing the five key strategies outlined in the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion: building healthy public policy, creating supportive environments, strengthening community action, developing personal skills, and reorienting health services. It discusses how nurses can contribute to shaping public policies, fostering environments conducive to healthy choices, empowering communities, enhancing individual skills for better health management, and reorienting health services to prioritize prevention. The essay emphasizes the importance of a multi-stakeholder approach, involving healthcare professionals, community members, and policymakers, to address the complex nature of obesity and promote equitable access to health resources and information. Ultimately, it underscores the significance of these strategies in reducing health inequities and promoting overall well-being through comprehensive obesity prevention efforts.

Bachelor Nursing Assignment
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Introduction:
In health promotion, people enable to take over and improve health. Obesity is a complex
disease and it can impact physical mental and social well being of the person. Hence, health
promotion is important aspect of obesity control and prevention. In this essay, role of nurse in
five strategies identified in Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (WHO, Health and Welfare
Canada & CPHA, 1986) will be discussed.
Building healthy policy:
Obesity crisis can be effectively controlled by increasing public support for strong public
policies. It can be helpful in the healthy choices easy. Government need to play significant
part in making policies for obesity control and prevention and nurse need to implement this
policy. Public health policies can be helpful in eliminating hurdles for prevention of obesity
by improving diets of the people and reducing risk of obesity. Health policies need to focus
on the toxic food environments. Healthy policy can be helpful in improving involvement of
all the stakeholders including nurses in addressing crises of obesity prevalence (Loureiro and
Freudenberg, 2012). Through public policy, political, economic and practical problems
related to obesity control can be effectively controlled. Health policy can be helpful in
providing obesity control interventions for all the classes of people irrespective of
socioeconomic, geographical and educational consideration. Nurse should make sure that
healthy policy is being implemented uniformly. Addressing health issue like obesity is not
responsibility of individual; however multiple stakeholders need to be involved in it (Thomas
and Reilly, 2015). Obesity is a complex disease and its control can be achieved by providing
intervention in different aspects like physical, nutritional, social and psychological. Hence,
professionals from different discipline like health, social, nutrition and psychology need to be
involved in control of obesity. Involvement of multiple stakeholders can be effectively
achieved by implementing effective and well-designed health policy. Nurse should improve
accessibility of all these stakeholders to the people. Few of the examples of health policies for
obesity include launching campaign for involving physical activity in daily life, providing
healthy food at schools and launching public awareness programme for risk factors of obesity
and preventive measures to control these risk factors (Cleland et al., 2013). Nurse need to
take active participation in all these activities.
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Create supportive environment:
Socio-ecological approach for obesity health promotion can be effectively achieved by
improving relationship between people and their environment. Supportive environment can
be created by implementing policies and regulations for consumption of safe food to control
obesity. In school canteen and offices healthy food need to be provided. There should be ban
on the high energy foods and carbonated drinks at thee places. Financial incentive need to be
provided for sponsoring the events like healthy food campaign (Raine, et al. 2012). Nurse
need to identify all these aspects and should make efforts to implement it. Nurse need to
provide education to the people in the disadvantaged society about the benefits of healthy
food consumption, optimum physical activity and consumption of alcohol and tobacco which
are the risk factors of obesity. There should be improvements in the access of equitable
supportive healthy environment without considering conflicting interests in the society. Nurse
need to improve access of health care services for people in the disadvantaged society
(Allender et a., 2012). All the members of the society need to be involved in the prevention
and control of obesity. These members include healthcare professionals including, family
members, community members, nutrition expert and physical trainer. Nurse need to create
health supportive environments at the healthcare centres and workplaces. At healthcare
centres, supportive environment can be created by making waiting rooms friendlier,
improving access to water and making seating places comfortable. At workplace, supportive
environment can be created by implementing stress management programmes, assisting
employees for quitting smoking and providing healthy snack options in the vending
machines. Environment to change behaviour towards healthy life need to be created (Blanck
and Kim, 2012).
Strengthen community action :
Public health nutrition community-based activities can be helpful to strengthen community
action. Community based activities include implementation of good nutrition policies,
providing healthy eating classes for people prone to obesity and providing healthy eating
advice through different media like television. Most effective community-based activity in
particular geographic area can be implemented by evaluating its usefulness in that particular
area because different community-based programmes can be with varied effectiveness in
different areas (Bazos, et al., 2013). Issues related to public health in particular area need to
collected from the nurses and intervention need to be provided based on the needs and
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requirements of the people in that particular area. Self-help and social support need to be
enabled by nurse based on the pre-existing and material resources which can be helpful in
strengthening public participation in obesity control and prevention. Nurse need to promote
people for involvement of people in health promotion activities because it can be helpful
keeping them active (Ziegahn et al., 2013). It is useful in reducing risk of obesity. Living
conditions of the people can be improved to improve well-being of the people. Strengthening
of the community can be helpful in the improving decision making of the people. It can be
helpful for the people to appeal for their needs and requirements. Nurse need to provide
education to community members for healthy diet and physical exercise. Policy development
for control and prevention of obesity can be helpful in controlling obesity. Different
stakeholders of the community need to be involved in obesity control. These stakeholders
include healthcare professionals including, social activist, nutritionist, physical trainer and
psychologist (Flynn, 2015).
Develop personal skills :
Personal skills for the health promotion can be improved by providing information, education
for health, and enhancing life skills. Personal skills can be improved by understanding link
between risk behaviours and obesity. It helps individual to promote protective behaviour and
provide opportunity to navigate obesity related information and analyse it. Nurse can play
significant role in enabling people to make healthy diet choice, to read nutritional information
on the food packets and to understand adverse effects of tobacco and alcohol consumption.
Personal skill development can be helpful for individual to implement this for life-long and
this sustained implementation is necessary in obesity because obesity is a chronic disease.
Personal skills can be helpful in having purpose of life for healthy life which can give
emotional and mental stability. This stress-free life is necessary for obesity prevention
because stress is one of the important risk factors for obesity (Rieger et al., et al., 2017).
Nurse can play role in improving accessibility of people to personal skills development
programme through availing skill development programmes from educational organisations
and institutions. Personal skill development is useful facilitating health promotion at school,
home, work and community settings. Personal skills can be developed through educational,
professional, commercial and voluntary bodies, and within the institutions themselves. It
indicates multi-sectoral approach is required for personal skill development. Personal skill
can be helpful people in participating in community activities for health promotion. Cognitive
skill development can be helpful in changing behaviour for improvement in access to
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healthcare activities. This behavioural change can be helpful in motivating people for keeping
optimum health and well-being. Nurse can play important role in changing behaviour of
people. Skill development can also be helpful in translating good intensions of the people into
productive actions (Flynn, 2015).
Reorient health services:
Health promotion need to be addressed at micro and macro level. Reorienting health services
can be achieved by promoting health research, providing professional education and training
and providing social and holistic intervention. Following are the examples of reorientation of
health services: increased number of training facilities, increased number nutritional food
centres improved access to training facilities and nutritional food centres. Nurse can play role
in changing attitude of organisation of health services. Hence, this organisation refocuses its
actions based on needs and requirements of the people. It can be helpful in providing not only
medical and clinical practices but also in providing services comprising of multi-sectoral and
multi-cultural services which can provide people with holistic care for management of
obesity (Nicholls et al., 2017). Motivator and barriers can impact implementation of health
promotion programme like encouraging physical activity. All the activities need to be
directed towards motivation of health promotion. In motivation programme, awareness of
physical activity need to be improved, desire to keep in shape need to augmented,
encouragement need to be given to others and able to overcome barriers for health promotion.
Reorienting health services brings change in focus from the clinical and curative services to
health promotion and prevention. In case of obesity, health promotion and prevention hold
more importance. Individuals and communitie’s healthier life can be improved by opening
channels between the health sector and other related sectors like social, political, economic
and physical environmental. Reorienting health services recognises impact of all health
determinants on obesity (Wolfenden et al., 2016).
Conclusion:
Health promotion strategies like building healthy public policy, creating supportive
environments, strengthening community action, developing personal skills and reorient health
services play significant role in prevention and control of obesity. Primary aim of The Ottawa
charter is to reduce inequities in health among people of different socioeconomic classes of
people. Requisite for health promotion are social and personal resources and physical
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capacities. All these requisites are covered in these five strategies and nurse plays important
role in promotion of obesity prevention.
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References:
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