Introduction: Health Promotion and Maintenance – NCLEX-RN®

00:01 Welcome to health promotion and maintenance.

00:03 This category of the encore has no subcategories.

00:07 It's its own category and is worth 6 to 12% of the overall encore exam.

00:13 Now, let me give you the official definition from NCSBN: the nurse provides indirect nursing care of the client that incorporates the knowledge of expected growth and development principles, prevention and/or early detection of health problems and strategies to achieve optimal health OC.

00:32 This is the pretty routine stuff, but I'm going to break it down for you a little bit more so you can know exactly what types of questions to expect.

00:40 Because when I first started studying this to be an instructor, I did not expect this one particular content to be in there.

00:48 You know what it is? Childbearing family content.

00:52 Yeah. I didn't expect it to be here, but this is where it lives, so it's kind of good news and bad news. If you really didn't like your childbearing families courses, you'll see that it's not really a huge portion of the NCLEX.

01:07 If you really liked your childbearing classes, the information is the same and you likely won't have as much content on the NCLEX.

01:14 That would be the equivalent of a three credit class in a nursing program.

01:18 But let me go over the things you do need to know.

01:20 So in this section you could be asked questions.

01:23 If it's under childbearing families, you can ask questions like How do you provide care and education for a newborn, for an infant from a toddler all the way up from birth through two years? So you want to make sure you're familiar with developmental stages as much as you can in chunks. You want to make sure that you know those and expect that you might get some questions on that specifically.

01:44 Now, we don't stop right there.

01:47 You also know about care and education for the preschool and the school age and the adolescent. That's the three years to 17 years category.

01:54 And you've got the adult from 18 to 64.

01:58 And then for the older adult client from 65 years and over.

02:02 So know those developmental stages for those main age categories, there's also prenatal care and education.

02:09 What does that consist of? Also, what about anti partum clients or clients in labor, postpartum and education for those clients? Okay, that's a lot of things about childbearing families.

02:20 If that's not your strong suit, it's okay.

02:23 What I really want you to focus on in this first part of our discussion is I want you to make sure that you know the developmental stages.

02:31 So go back and review those.

02:34 And then I want you to think about the care of the childbearing person before, during and after birth.

02:41 Think about what's the worst case scenario.

02:44 What would tell you that this particular client is in trouble? For example, in postpartum, we're watching what's the worst case scenario? Hemorrhage. So you're going to watch that client very carefully for signs of hemorrhage. If they soak more than one Perry pad an hour, that's a sign that it's too much bleeding. They're going to require follow up and monitoring.

03:04 So look at the three stages before, during and after pregnancy.

03:09 We just discussed the part about health promotion and maintenance that surprised me.

03:14 Childbearing. Now let's really dig into what you would expect to find in health promotion and maintenance. So big part of our role is our ends is to educate clients.

03:22 We want to help them to understand how to prevent or how we treat high risk health behaviors. Let's say you've got a patient who is smoking several packs of cigarettes a day. As a nurse, my job would be to try to help that patient take steps toward eliminating or minimizing smoking in their life.

03:42 Now next, we're talking about the client's ability to manage care in their home environment. So part of health promotion is you being able to think about that patient's home care environment and make sure they will be safe when they're discharged.

03:57 You also assess and educate clients about health risks based on their family, population and community.

04:02 That sounds very nurse-y, doesn't it? But what's that going to look like in a question? Well, you may get a question that says you've got four patients.

04:11 Which one of these patients is at the highest risk to developing type two diabetes or hypertension or whatever the diagnosis is? The trick to those questions is go through them factor by factor by factor by factor, each item that they use, to describe that patient's health status, you determine if it is a risk factor for type two, yes or no.

04:33 If it is, give it a point.

04:35 Go to the next one.

04:37 Is this a risk factor, yes or no? If it is, give it a point and work your way through each client one factor at a time.

04:45 Then look at the overall scores.

04:47 That'll help you get a better idea of who's most at risk for developing.

04:53 The rest of these are very similar.

04:55 You might be asked to assess a client's readiness to learn how they prefer to learn.

05:00 What are the barriers to their learning.

05:02 You might be asked to plan or participate in community health, education, or educate clients about preventative care and health maintenance recommendations.

05:10 So those kind of lumped together.

05:12 But I hope you've got a feel for what health promotion and maintenance questions in this category will be like.

05:18 Good luck on our questions in this section.

05:21 Get in there and practice and I wish you the best.