Health-Promoting Lifestyles And Its Related Factors Among Clinical Practice Nursing Students

Objective: Based on Pender's health promotion model, this study aimed to examine the health-promoting lifestyles of clinical nursing students in Mainland China and analyze the related factors.Methodology: The research design was a cross-sectional descriptive study. The study population was 424 clinical nursing students who were practicing at the five tertiary affiliated teaching hospitals of medical universities in 2005. The research instruments included 5 questionnaires: The Health-promoting Lifestyle Profile; Health Concept Scale; Perceived Health Status Scale; Perceived Health Self-efficacy Scale; and sociodemographic characteristics of respondents. All the questionnaires were tested the validity and reliability by the original translators. The internal consistency test was used for the reliability in this study and results showed that all the instruments had good reliability. Data were dealt with by using Minitab 14 software programme. Student test, the Kruskal-Wallis nonparameter test, Pearson correlation, and multiple regressions were employed.Results: The research results showed that the nursing students had a relatively poor health-promoting lifestyles with the mean of total score at 67.41, standard deviation 14.79; the mean score of each item at 1.87, standard deviation 0.41. The nursing students performed best in the safety of working place, but worst in exercise. There were significant differences in health-promoting lifestyles among nursing students who were different in the various age groups, educational levels, living arrangements, and health promotion course taken. There were significantly positive associations between health-promoting lifestyles and perceived health status, health concepts, and perceived health self-efficacy. Living arrangement, health concepts, and four sub-dimensions of perceived health selfefficacy were contributed to the health-promoting lifestyles, which can explain 37.3 percent of its variance. Among these factors, perceived health self-efficacy was the strongest predictor able to explain 29.3 percent variance of health-promoting lifestyles.Conclusion: The research results may raise concern about the students' healthpromoting lifestyles for rectifying the weaknesses. Nursing educators as well as nursing students need carefully examine the causes for the low rate of exercise. Moreover, health vi promotion course should be included in the normal nursing curriculum. Nursing educators could also motivate the students to perform good health practice and enhance their health self-efficacy. It would also lead to better health-promoting lifestyles by the instructors' role models.