Nurses' Lives: Overweight and obesity among nurses in the UK

Kyle, Richard; Hoyle, Louise; Mahoney, Catherine

Abstract

Healthcare professionals are at the heart of efforts to support and improve the health of local communities across Europe. Nurses have an established and expanding role in health promotion through offering advice and interventions to encourage behaviour change. Because nurses are the largest single occupational group in global healthcare systems this means that the impact they can have through their effort is considerable. However, recent research has shown that there is a connection between nurses’ own health and their health promotion with patients. For example, a recent systematic review assessing the impact of personal health behaviours on health promotion practice found that patients may be more likely to accept advice offered by a visibly healthy professional. Nurses’ own health-related behaviours are also known to affect the frequency with which they offer health promotion advice and people’s perception of its credibility. Supporting nurses to improve their health is therefore important to ensure that health promotion messages are shared and acted upon by the public. Improving nurses’ health may also help to reduce sickness absence and injury among nurses which could address shortages of nursing staff across Europe. For this reason, understanding the health of nurses and developing interventions to enable nurses to improve their health is an important public health priority.

Citation

Kyle, R., Hoyle, L., & Mahoney, C. (2018, April). Nurses' Lives: Overweight and obesity among nurses in the UK. Presented at Ghent University International Week, Ghent, Belgium

• Presentation Conference Type: Presentation / Talk
• Conference Name: Ghent University International Week
• Start Date: Apr 23, 2018
• End Date: Apr 27, 2018
• Deposit Date: Apr 26, 2020
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2655652
• Additional Information: The U!REKA research network on nurses’ health and wellbeing aims to create links between colleagues and institutions across Europe with a shared interest in understanding and improving nurses’ health and wellbeing. The network does this by conducting collaborative research projects, exchanging staff between partner institutions, and sharing ideas and approaches to public- and policy-engagement to ensure research findings have a meaningful and lasting impact on practice, policy and public debate in each partner country and at a European level. The goal of this U!REKA network is that by 2021 all six U!REKA partner institutions will be involved in a programme of research that will provide epidemiological evidence to inform development of interventions to improve nurses’ health and wellbeing across Europe and a platform to test what works, where and why.