Health promotion and health education conceptions of future nurses and other university students: influence of the initial training

Abstract

The general aim of the present study was to compare the system of values in HP/HE conveyed in courses in the area of health, pre-school teaching, basic teaching and social service, in order to understand the relation between the conceptions to be taught and the taught conceptions. For this purpose, we first carried out a content analysis of HP/HE models in national and international publications and developed a descriptive, comparative and cross-sectional study. For the latter an auto-filling questionnaire was applied to a sample of 709 students of seven university courses. The mental representation of the health concept by the total of the students’ sample was expressed in five key words (by decreasing order): Well-being, Hospital, Disease, Doctors and Nurses. The predominance of these key words is connected to a reductionist vision of the health determinants, centred in the system of health, excluding the other ones. When looking at the evolution of the concept of health from the 1st to the 4th year of university training, the Braga Nursing course (BR-N) was the one with higher decrease in the key words associated to the reductionist vision of the term and, similarly, the course of Basic Teaching Teachers (BTT) was the one with more increases associated to the wide concept of health. In contrast, the VR-N course did not show substantial changes on the perspective of health, keeping the technical-centric view of health along training.