A nurse as a reliable educator? Analysis of selected health behaviors of nurses

Abstract

Introduction: The nurse, in addition to nurture the patient should shape his awareness of a healthy lifestyle. The aim of the research was to analyze the health behaviors of nurses. Material and methods: The research participants included 100 nurses working in hospital wards. The researcher used his own questionnaire containing questions about selected lifestyle elements. The research included also the measurement of body weight and height, and the calculation of the Body Mass Index (BMI). The results were described with the use of the basic descriptive statistics, the chi2 test, Mann-Whitney U test, and the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. The differences were deemed significant when p<0,05. Results: Only 5.0% of nurses devoted at least 150 minutes per week to aerobic activity. More than half of the respondents (58.0%) said that on weekdays they did not perform any strength exercises for major muscle groups. According to the nurses, lack of time (65.0%) was the greatest impediment to their physical activity. A significant percentage of the respondents (40.0%) did not pay any attention to the calorific or nutritional value of their meals. As many as 30.0% of the surveyed nurses indicated that they ate irregularly, and 22.0% of them ate only 1-3 meals during the day. Excessive body weight was observed in almost half of the participants. For the majority of the nurses, their professional work was the main source of stress (46.0%). Conclusions: Despite their knowledge on healthy lifestyle, it seems that nurses do not fully implement its objectives. Therefore, the majority of them are not good role models for patients.