Overview
Introduction
Health promotion reduces exposure to disease and strengthens factors that support health; screening looks for disease before symptoms appear.
Health promotion reduces exposure to disease and strengthens factors that support health; screening looks for disease before symptoms appear. The nurse must first decide which of these tasks is occurring. Immunization and tobacco-use prevention are primary prevention. A mammogram in an asymptomatic patient is secondary prevention. Cardiac rehabilitation after myocardial infarction is tertiary prevention. A screening result is not a diagnosis. Screening can identify people who need diagnostic testing, treatment, or closer surveillance, but it can also produce false-positive results, unnecessary procedures, anxiety, and overdiagnosis. Safe preventive care therefore has two parts: select the right patient and test, then make sure an abnormal result reaches the next step.