Health Promotion, Education, Counseling, and Coordination in Primary Health Care Nursing

The evolution of advanced nursing practice over the past several decades has stimulated a number of studies of the activities of nurses specializing in the area of primary health care. These studies have ignored the nursing component of nurse practitioners' role in the areas of health care coordination, health promotion, health education, and counseling. We examined the extent to which nurse practitioners reported involvement in these areas in their practices. Study findings pointed to a high frequency of health‐promotion activities, with 98 percent of the respondents reporting this type of care delivered during the reporting day, including health screening, nutrition information, exercise counseling, family planning, education, and risk factor analysis. The most common coordination activities were referrals for mental health, social work or drug rehabilitation, vision services, alcohol problems, and hearing services. Overall, study results supported the assertion that nurse practitioners considered that they provide their clients with a wide array of coordination, health‐promotion, health‐education, and counseling services within a nursing framework.