Edinburgh Napier University

  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.