Introduction to Health Promotion and the Ottawa Charter

Ottawa charter for health promotion was the first international summit conducted by the WHO in 1986, in Ottawa, Canada. The main agenda of this summit is to provide better health to all people with the aim of ‘health for all’ (World Health Organisation, 2018). The charter strained on the importance of socio-environmental strategies and tactics to achieve better health for people. As people more conscious about their health and lifestyle that is directly connected with their health, people adopt various health promotional habits. Now people are looking for good physic and a healthy lifestyle by taking proper food nutrition, avoiding the use of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, focusing on self- control, and want to be mentally and physically fit. However, stress in youth is an important health issue all over the world. There are several reasons behind stress such as school pressure, relationship issues, family tensions etc. Nurses can play a key role in managing such stress in the young generation if they work according to the Ottawa charter’s five strategic actions to promote health among people. The role of nurses cannot be ignored in removing such type of mental illness, which is destroying the lives of our younger generation (Linsley, Kane, & Owen, 2011).

Stress in youth is one of the major concerns all over the world. It has been observed that youth normally from their school days bearing so much pressure in their mind regarding their career, life, or even they suffered from family problems. To reduce stress in youth nurses can play an important role by guiding the patients in their work. However, apart from this the problem, mental stress is a major problem for the society when we consider our younger generation (Lee, 2015). There are many causes of mental stress in young people such as career, study, result, family tension, relationships with friends or peers, love, and affections etc. However, Stress may be in form of both ‘good stress’ and ‘bad stress.’ Good stress motivates and energize our feelings to do something better, but bad stress adversely affect our ability to perform or work and our coping mechanism are overwhelmed by the stress (Rumbold, Fletcher, & Daniels, 2012). Here we talk about bad stress that causes problems for youngsters and especially causes several mental disorders, which affect both mental and physical health of a young people.

The Ottawa charter plan describes the five-action plan that can be used by a nurse to reduce mental health in young people. The Ottawa health promotion charter plan focuses on health promotion as well as focus on mental illness (McMurray & Clendon, 2015). Nurses can use these five-action plans, which are as follow to reduce the stress in the young generation:

1. Build Healthy Public policy

The Role of Nurses in Mental Health and Stress Reduction

The main objective of the Ottawa charter is to develop a policy across all the sectors that can positively or negatively affect the mental health of young peoples or causes stress in their mind. The role of parents and school/college teachers can play an important role in reducing the stress in youngsters. Apart from this, a nurse can also play an important role to reduce the stress of young people by working in collaboration with teacher and parents (Flaschberger, Nitsch, & Waldherr, 2012). A good public policy of government also prevents the mental stress of younger people by implementing an effective stress management program in schools and colleges. The governments should focus on making compulsory for every schools and college to schedule various stress management programs to handle the stress and educate the young generation about how they can control their stress by staying mentally fit. Nurses can play an important role in implementing such programs and can act as a mediator between parents and teachers to examine the health status of youngsters. Nurses can play a key role in persuading youngsters, his/her families, and the society on behalf of their clients that how they can avoid mental stress and can promote effective health policy (Drewitz-Chesney, 2012).

2. Create Supportive Environments

An effective stress management program introduces by the government in all schools, colleges, and universities can help to reduce the mental stress of young people. Stress not only affect the health of a youngster rather it also causes problems like the use of alcohol, tobacco products, injuries, road accidents because of rash driving, suicide attempts etc. A healthy public policy related to stress management assists in creating a supportive healthy environment that ensures a healthy, enjoyable, safe, secure, and stress-free life to young generations (Kobau, Seligman, Peterson, Diener, Zack, Chapman, & Thompson, 2011). Mental stress sometimes causes suicide attempts in youngsters. According to a research, it has been found that most of the young people who did not able to face mental toughness and stress went for suicide attempts. Suicide not only affects individuals and families rather it also affects the entire community. A nurse can help both the young people and parents to take care of such type of conditions and educate them about how they can be mentally tough to face such a situation.

3. Strengthen Community Action

Strengthen community action is important because they can participate in every decision making against fighting with stress. The community as a whole is a more influencing factor than individuals in implementing any plan against stress or any mental illness. Awareness about stress among community members helps to inspire and influence them about their own health issues and problems (Dugani, Bhutta, & Kissoon, 2017). The success of the Ottawa Charter depends on increasing control of people over their own health and issues that impact on it. The role of young people is so important to the Ottawa principle of equity and participation in health promotion. A nurse can help to launch a campaign at different places like schools and colleges that focus on how to handle stress. Nurses can also use social and public media to spread awareness among people about stress and its causes (Fyffe, 2009). They also can show them that how it can badly affect the health of young people. Most of the people are facing depression and mental diseases because they could not be able to handle the high level of stress. Thus, here the role of nursing is so important to strengthen the community against stress and tell them how it can destroy the life of their children and other young members of the families.

Major Causes of Mental Stress in the Younger Generation

4. Develop Personal Skills

One of the actions of the Ottawa charter, which was very important for health promotion, is to ‘develop person skills’ among people, thus they can better handle their health problems. If a person more in control of their life then they have more inner power to make decisions to transform themselves into a better and healthy person (Mcqueen, & De-Salazar, 2011). Nurses play an important role here to educate people about the advantage of stay physically and mentally fit. Those people who are mentally strong and good command over their emotions and feelings can better handle the stress. Thus, it is necessary to develop skills in those people who are not able to face tough time or situation of their life. If these skills can be developed in a young people, he/she can manage any type of stress. Nurses can educate people to develop their inner skills to control and manage the stress of their work life or daily life (Laschinger, Wong, Regan, Young-Ritchie, & Bushell, 2013). In fighting with stress, it is very essential for a youth to be strong both physically and mentally. Thus, the role of self-development is so important along with the role of parents, in fighting with stress in the young generation. If parents can be friends with their child and will share his/her every problem, the chances of stress in younger generation will be minimised, because it normally arises because young generation hesitates to share their problems with anyone.

5. Reorient Health Services

Reorienting health care is an important factor in health promotion. It ensures every people that caring about the health is compulsory for everyone. Health reorientation needs the involvement of every person in his/her daily life. The people should understand the importance of health, which is the primary resource of their life rather than anything. Re-orientating health care services mean that the nurses can play an important role in collaboration and development of a relationship of various sectors of the community (Marry & Flynn, 2015). There are various sectors of society such as the parents, their young children, schools/colleges, hospitals, doctors, medical counsellors etc. Nurses can play a role of an intervener in coordination with parents and medical experts to influence and guide younger people about their stress problem and talk about the various problems that affect their lives.

Conclusion

Parents and teachers are the two important factors that can play an important role to minimise the stress of the younger generation. One of the major problems of the today’s young generation is that they do not like to share their problems with anyone. This is the big reason for stress in youth. A nurse can play a role of counsellor and launch several campaigns along with community people, parents, and teachers against the stress problem and its adverse effect on the body of our young generations. If parents, teachers, community, and teachers all work together and be friends with young people and share their problems, definitely the stress problem can be minimized from our young generation.

References

Drewitz-Chesney, C. (2012). Posttraumatic stress disorder among paramedics: exploring a new solution with occupational health nurses using the Ottawa Charter as a framework. Workplace health & safety, 60(6), 257-263.

Dugani, S., Bhutta, Z. A., & Kissoon, N. (2017). Empowering people for sustainable development: the Ottawa Charter and beyond. Journal of global health, 7(1).

Flaschberger, E., Nitsch, M., & Waldherr, K. (2012). Implementing school health promotion in Austria: experiences from a pilot training course. Health promotion practice, 13(3), 364-369.

Fyffe, T. (2009). Nursing shaping and influencing health and social care policy. Journal of Nursing Management, 17(8), 698-706.

Kobau, R., Seligman, M. E., Peterson, C., Diener, E., Zack, M. M., Chapman, D., & Thompson, W. (2011). Mental health promotion in public health: Perspectives and strategies from positive psychology. American journal of public health, 101(8), 1-9.

Laschinger, H. K., Wong, C., Regan, S., Young-Ritchie, C., & Bushell, P. (2013). Workplace incivility and new graduate nurses’ mental health: the protective role of resiliency. Journal of Nursing Administration, 43(7/8), 415-421.

Lee, M. S. (2015). The principles and values of health promotion: building upon the Ottawa charter and related WHO documents. Korean Journal of Health Education and Promotion, 32(4), 1-11.

Linsley, P., Kane, R., & Owen, S. (2011). Nursing for public health: promotion, principles, and practice. UK: Oxford University Press.

Marry, A., & Flynn, T. (2015). Empowering people to be healthier: Public health nutrition through the Ottawa Charter. The proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 47(3), 303-22. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.1017%2FS002966511400161X

McMurray, A., & Clendon, J. (2015). Community health and wellness: Primary health care in practice. 5^th ed. NSW, Australia: Elsevier. 

Mcqueen, D. V., & De-Salazar, L. (2011). Health promotion, the Ottawa Charter and ‘developing personal skills’: a compact history of 25 years. Health promotion international, 26(suppl_2), ii194-ii201.

Rumbold, J. L., Fletcher, D., & Daniels, K. (2012). A systematic review of stress management interventions with sports performers. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, 1(3), 173.

World Health Organisation (2018). The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion First International Conference on Health Promotion, Ottawa, 21 November 1986. Retrieved from: https://www.ngos4healthpromotion.net/wordpressa4hp/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/OttawaCharter.pdf