Health Promoting Lifestyle, Perceived Health Competence, Barriers and Benefits Among Nursing Students in Alexandria

Abstract

Increased understanding of health practices and greater efforts toward promoting healthy behaviors and wellbeing among youth is essential. Objective: Assess nursing students' current health promoting behaviors, perceived health competence, benefits and barriers to health promoting activities. The study was carried out at the Faculty of Nursing, Alexandria University. subjects of the study were 300 nursing students during the academic year 2015-2016. Five tools were used for data collection. The first tool was students’ basic data structured interview schedule to identify data related to students' personal and socio-demographic characteristics and health status. The second tool was Health Promoting Lifestyle Profile II (HPLP- II) to measure the health promoting behaviors. The third tool was Perceived Health Competence scale to measure the degree to which an individual feels capable of reasonably managing his/her health outcomes. The forth tool was Benefits Assessment Scale to measure the perceived benefits of health promoting behaviors, while the fifth tool was The Barriers to Health Promoting Activities Scale to measure the barriers that keep an individual from taking responsibility for his/her health. Findings of the present study revealed that the majority of the students had fair health promoting lifestyle and health competence level. More than half of the students had high perception of benefits of health promoting behaviors while lack of facilities, bad weather, work overload were among the main perceived barriers against such healthy behaviors. The study concluded that the majority of the students were fair in total health promoting lifestyle; the gender of the students didn’t affect their health promoting life style in a significant manner. The vast majority of the students had fair health competence, more than half of the students had high perception regarding the benefits of the health promoting lifestyle. Lack of convenient facilities was the first barrier to health promoting lifestyle.

Keywords: Health promotion, Health competence, Benefits, Barriers, Youth