 Hi everyone and welcome back to the vlog. I'm so sorry I haven't posted for a couple of weeks, I've been taking some time out, haven't been very well, I'm okay now, I'm back to it, getting stuck in and here we go. Today's video I wanted to do for somebody who requested a little bit more information about health promotion and what a great video because this is my job as a GP nurse. So I first came into contact with health promotion just like this person as well during my excess course we had a health promotion module. We had to set up a stall in the middle of the atrium of the college and create this health promotion event. Our one was based around alcohol awareness. So we had loads of different posters, we had Giant Jenga and you had to play Jenga with beer goggles on and stuff like that. It was really, really fun. But before then I didn't know much about health promotion as such. But basically what you're doing when you're doing your health promotion spiel at work or as a student, wherever you are, you're trying to get the person to be healthier, to make some healthier choices in their life, to be able to live a long and healthy life ahead of them. And that's really not gonna work if you're gonna sit there going, you need to stop smoking because it's bad for you. So it's really important that the way that we do our health promotion is gonna meet the person's needs and what they need and how they're thinking and we're all different. We're all individual people. So it's really hard to sort of get it right for everybody. So it's really important that you adjust your body language, you adjust your tone of voice, you adjust the way you say things, depending on the person in front of you. And this is something you do get used to when you keep going over it and meeting different people and doing it, you do get into a routine and you do get into a flow of doing things and you do get used to your patients, especially in general practice, like we see our patients time and time again. So they get used to you and you get used to them. So it is really nice. And to be honest, it does become a little bit easier as you go. But you will always have that one patient we've all had that one patient. It doesn't matter what you do, what you say. They don't wanna change. They don't wanna change their behaviors. They don't wanna live a long, happy life. I literally had someone say to me, I don't care, I'm gonna die anyway, may as well die happy. And I said, that's fine, that's your decision. That's your decision. I can just give you all of the information and all of the health promotion and all the leaflets in the world. But if you're not gonna take that on board, then that's absolutely your choice. Document it, done. Do not take the burden of all of their health on your shoulders, because at the end of the day, the person has to work with you. The best you can do is give all of the information, try and make change where you can. If you can't, then that's up to the person. So one tip for health promotion is, ask open-ended questions. Don't ask closed-off questions. So you want to say, okay, so why do you smoke? And they'll say, yeah, I enjoy it. I'll give you all their reasons for why they smoke still. And then you delve a little bit deeper so you could say things like, okay, but why is that? And then you delve a little bit deeper and say, have you ever thought about what a smoke-free life would look like? See, plant the seed, get them thinking and think, oh, what would my life be like without smoking? How much money would I save? What could I do with all that money that I'm saving? How healthier would I feel without smoking? What about the people around me? What would they think? And it starts to get those wheels in emotion just to get them thinking about their health. And this is the sort of thing that I learned recently, actually, during a motivational interviewing training session. And it was just trying to input these little questions and little bits into people's minds to get them thinking about it, getting to think about changing their lives, but getting them to make that decision for themselves rather than you telling them to. And sometimes when people start to open up and talk to you, you'll find that there's deeper reasonings and deeper meanings that maybe might be above your expertise where you then have to refer on to maybe mental health teams, for example, smoking cessation, the doctors, things like that. And that's okay. You can't know everything, you can't help everybody. You're not their saviours. But as long as you put in place these little things to refer them on and get them the help that they do need, that's all you can do. So in my role as a GP nurse, it is my job to health promote. It is our job to hopefully prevent that hospital admission at the end of the day. So we've got asthma, we've got COPD, we've got diabetes management, we've got hypertension. We want to stop those heart attacks from happening. We want to stop those blood clots from happening. And as part of that sort of process, we now do the NHS health checks and these begin when you are 40 years old. And these are to help make people aware of things, but also to help pick up anything that might be going on. Is someone's cholesterol a bit borderline? Is it a bit high? Have they got an irregular pulse rate, for example? Something that's never been picked upon before so that we get it and we prevent anything from happening to them whilst they're okay and they're walking into your clinic. And that is my biggest part of health promotion is during that time. So I'm telling them about the benefits of exercise, the benefits of eating better, making little tiny changes, switching from one oil to another oil, cutting out high fats, high saturates, high dairy products, things like that and making these simple little changes in their life to get that level down if they've got a high cholesterol, for example. Same with diabetes, like learning about carb management and sizes, switching portions and things like that, eating less sugar as well, obviously, because it's diabetes. And just these little things that they can look out for symptoms-wise as well to help manage their diabetes. But in my role, I'm the respiratory nurse for our clinic so I do that a lot of asthma and COPD so mine is very much smoking cessation. I'm not trained in smoking cessation but I do try and give as much health promotion as I can and trying to get them to cut down or cut back or stop smoking if they can, especially with COPD because it's just gonna affect their lungs more and more and more and cause more damage. So as part of my role is a little bit of health promotion with the smoking side of things and things like that as well. And doing things like lung exercises, breathing exercises, which is hopefully gonna help their lungs. And another thing that some of you know I'm really passionate about sexual health contraception, women's health, transgender health. I love all of that sort of thing. So I'm really passionate about that. So when I get people in for their cervical screening, for example, oh, I love it. And I love just talking to them about it and I love promoting breast health as well. So some people don't know how to check their breasts. So I do all of that now and I've got extra leaflets as well that's gonna help them do that. And I just love talking about that sort of thing. That is where my main experience lies and my passion. And health promotion and getting people to take better care of their own health is a massive part of the NHS long-term plan at the minute. As some of you are aware, we are under massive strain at the minute at the NHS. We haven't got enough staff. We've got way too many patients. We've got things like obesity and long-term conditions that are rising. Then we've got COVID impacting on top of that. There's quite a lot. So the more health promotion and prevention that we can do now, the better the impact on the health services later on in life. So, but again, like I said, it's up to the patient as well. It's not just up to us. The patients are gonna do whatever they wanna do at the end of the day. We can only do our best and hopefully our best is gonna make a difference to someone's life. And health promotion can come in a variety of forms. It could be verbally. So while I'm sitting, talking to my patient, I will do it. There's plenty of leaflets on the NHS website, on the specific long-term condition management websites as well, on smoking websites, alcohol awareness websites, all of that. They've got some really good resources that you can give to your patients. You can download, print them out. Where I work, we have a text messaging service. So sometimes I'll text patients, all of the guidelines and leaflets and things like that that they can use. They can print off at home if they want to, but they've got it on their smartphone, ready to use if they need it. We have visual aids. So we'll have posters and things like that, open surgeries for people to look at. And hopefully it's that subliminal sort of message that they pass as they walk into the waiting room and they think, oh, yeah, I have thought about stop smoking. I'm just using smoking because that's the easiest one to look at. Or a Weight Watchers program. Like NHS, we do three, 12 weeks free Weight Watchers programs. So people might see that in the waiting room and think, oh, I've been looking at something like that and this is free. So it sort of entices them in a little bit by little by little. But just, there's so many different ways of doing health promotion. Another one is events as well. So creating like we did for our access course, we created an event in our atrium to create a bit more awareness around it. Awareness days, using making use of the awareness days as well. If you go on the awarenessdays.com, I think it is, I'll put the link here. It'll show you all the different health promotion events that are going on. Things like the cervical screening awareness week that was a couple of weeks ago. It's really good to get that health promotion out there as well. Get it on the news, get it on social media and just spread the message. And hopefully these little tiny things will eventually sink in and just make people think about their own health and creating better lifestyle for themselves. However, one of the biggest problems I think that we have is things are costly. Like if you'll go out and you want to buy some vegetables, some fruits, it's really expensive. Compared to going to Mac-E-D's where you can get a happy meal for £2.99, £3, whatever it is now. And that's a meal. And then you're going buying salad and fruits and things like that. The price goes up and then it runs out a day as well really fast. That's what I've found anyway. When I put it in the fridge and then after a few days, it's not very good anymore. Maybe it just depends where you get it from. I don't know. But so then you're just wasting food as well. So I think that's a massive problem as well to consider if you're thinking about health promotion is cost of things. The things like inequalities in healthcare. You know, rich people can afford to eat well if they want to. But someone like me, I've come from a really poor background. A salad was a treat for us. You know, we would have a lot of frozen foods, fried foods, chips, things like that. No wonder there was cardiovascular disease in our family. And every now and then it'd be like a treat. Like, oh, should we have a really nice ham and egg salad or something like that? And it'd be like, oh yeah, I'm really fancy that. We go out and we buy all these nice salads and things to put in the salad. Because it is expensive. Same with gyms and memberships and things like that. It's really expensive. Weight Watchers program, Slimming World, all these sort of different things that people want to do, they can't do because they haven't got the money for it, is a really massive, massive problem, I think, in healthcare services and in the population. And also people out living in the sticks in the rural sort of areas, they're not gonna have access to these things like fancy gyms and Slimming World and Weight Watchers that might not have any transport to get to places. So it's how we target these people as well that really matters with health promotion. Not only that, but people can easily access YouTube and things like that now, which is great if you've got the internet. But a lot of people, again, don't can't afford the internet. They haven't got laptops, they haven't got technology to make use of YouTube, yoga or something like that. It's really hard for some people and it's really hard to sort of, when you're trying to do your health promotion and things like that to manage that sort of thing. And that's probably one of the downsides to health promotion is trying to get it right for everybody because sometimes you just can't. But there are also a lot of charities and a lot of food bank services and things like that that go out and provide sort of meals for people. There's so much that going on out there that you just don't think about. So my next tip is have a little research around and see what sort of charities there are, see what sort of campaigns there are around your area that you can include in your health promotion that might help someone that's like that that's got this massive health inequality. And one campaign that I've seen recently is, I can't remember what it's called, it's like the healthcare bus or something, but it's a bus that goes around. It's got nurses and healthcare professionals that goes round to those rural populations that can't get into their GP practice. So they're going to provide a service in a bus out there. I just thought this was amazing. I haven't looked into it 100% properly, but I'm gonna find the link for you. I'm gonna put it in the description below because it is amazing and that'd be really, really good to include again in your health promotion stuff if that's what you're doing at the minute. But if you're not and you're just watching this for information, have a look at it because it is an amazing idea and there is funding as well actually out there through different places like the Florence Nightingale Foundation, the Burdettros, things like that. They set up scholarships for people to do these little projects. So there is some little money pots and charities and things like that that you can sort of pull from if you would like to set up something like this in your area, would be incredible. And please let me know below if you've set up something like this, if there's something going on in your area, that I might not have seen out there, please comment below because I love looking at this stuff and I love seeing what's going out there. It makes my day. So it's just a little bit of food for thought for you. Like we always think about health promotion as this really good thing, like, oh my God, I'm gonna do this health promotion, I'm gonna save lives, I'm gonna make a change. But actually it's not always like that. It's very much down to costs, it's down to money. What can people afford? How feasible are things for these patients? How are they gonna get to places? It's quite a lot and I think that's really good. If you're doing a health promotion topic or a presentation or an event or something like that, it's really good to put all these discussions in there because that's your critical analysis then as well for it. Your pros, your cons and what's going well but what's actually going wrong and how can we improve that? But yeah, I think that's it from me. I can't think of anything else to cover on health promotion. I feel like I've talked about health promotion a lot and I don't wanna bore you to death but if there's anything else I haven't covered you wanna know more about, comment below. I will get back to you and help you out. But for now, goodbye and see you next time.