COMMUNITY NURSES AND HEALTH PROMOTION - ETHICAL AND POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES

This paper brings together ideas from two perspectives on ethics and h ealth promotion. A discussion of the ethical dimension of the health p romotion practice of community nurses is set in the wider context of h ealth policy, with particular reference to health gain and individual responsibility. It is widely held that nurses have a key role to play in health promotion and that this is particularly the case for nurses working in primary health care. This assumption is reinforced by polic y documents from the World Health Organization, the Department of Heal th and statutory bodies such as the United Kingdom Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting. The approach of many nurses t o health promotion has tended on the one hand to be somewhat naive and on the other to be authoritarian and didactic; there has been little discussion in the nursing literature of the ethical aspects of health promotion. However, recent developments in nurse education, such as Pr oject 2000 and the consequent changes to preregistration programmes, h ave resulted in increased attention to both ethics and health promotio n within the curriculum.