Applying health promotion knowledge to self-care: healthy eating and weight management for nurses
Intended for healthcare professionals
Evidence and practice    

Applying health promotion knowledge to self-care: healthy eating and weight management for nurses

Holly Blake Professor of behavioural medicine, School of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Nottingham Medical School, Nottingham, England

Why you should read this article:
  • To recognise the importance of nurses maintaining their health and undertaking self-care

  • To understand how health promotion knowledge could be applied to support healthy eating among nurses

  • To consider the approaches that nurses and healthcare organisations could implement to promote health and well-being in the workplace

Promoting health in the workplace is a national and international public health priority, and health promotion is a central aspect of the nursing role. However, nurses’ knowledge of health promotion does not always translate to self-care and there are barriers to some aspects of self-care at work, such as healthy eating. Evidence suggests that rates of overweight and obesity in nurses are relatively high and commensurate with the general population, which has implications for their health and well-being and their delivery of health promotion to patients. This article discusses health in the workplace and some of the evidence on overweight and obesity among nurses, including how this may influence their health promotion practice. The author also considers barriers and enablers to nurses’ healthy eating at work and suggests some approaches that individual nurses and healthcare organisations can take to improve healthy eating.

Nursing Standard. doi: 10.7748/ns.2024.e12393

Peer review

This article has been subject to external double-blind peer review and checked for plagiarism using automated software

@hollyblakenotts

Correspondence

holly.blake@nottingham.ac.uk

Conflict of interest

None declared

Blake H (2024) Applying health promotion knowledge to self-care: healthy eating and weight management for nurses. Nursing Standard. doi: 10.7748/ns.2024.e12393

Published online: 02 September 2024

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