Nursing, health education and health promotion: lessons learned, progress made and challenges ahead

It is now approaching a decade ago that the WHO (1989) proposed in Nursing Leadership for Health For All that nurses have a key role to play in the health promotion movement. It therefore seems timely to reflect on the success or otherwise of changes in nurse education and practice that have been initiated in the intervening years in an attempt to respond to this challenge. During the 1990s, nursing curricula for first level qualification have been designed with the aim of ensuring that nursing students are exposed to (some form of) health promotion theory and practice. The emphasis on continuing professional development in the post-qualification period has also ushered in opportunities for nurses to study health promotion. In the UK, for example, there has been a radical re-orientation of the pre-registration curricula towards a focus on health and health promotion in the wake of the Project 2000 (UKCC, 1986) recommendations, and a proliferation of opportunities for registered nurses to continue their professional development through post-registration courses at degree and post-graduate levels. Many of the latter do contain a discrete component of course content labelled as 'health promotion'.