Lifestyle assessment. A tool for practice.

Examining a patient's lifestyle becomes imperative in a health-promotion and disease-prevention practice. A recently developed, practical lifestyle assessment tool is the Health Risk Appraisal (HRA), which examines the strengths and weaknesses of a patient's health behaviors. An HRA identifies detrimental health practices that predispose a patient to onset of illness. HRA instruments estimate the odds that a person with a given set of characteristics will become ill or die from selected diseases during a specified period of time. The HRA consists of three components: (1) an intake instrument; (2) comparison of patient data with normed data and weighting of patient data to estimate risk; and (3) an individual risk appraisal or output instrument. Users of the tool advocate that best results occur when the HRA is used in combination with other strategies such as health counseling and peer support. For the nurse, an overview of available tools and criteria for tool selection was discussed as well as pros and cons of the instrument. A model was presented that incorporated the use of HRAs with health contracting and health monitoring to assist motivated patients making long-term lifestyle changes. The professional nurse was urged to use and adapt this powerful tool to various practice settings.