The growing proportion of older people in the UK population will, in the absence of preventive healthcare, increase the prevalence of chronic health problems and health services demand (Department of Health, DOH 2000). Traditionally, health promotion in the UK has been situated in primary care and seen as the responsibility of public health professionals. There has been little research into how routine practice in the NHS can include health promotion for patients aged over 65 years, this is particularly true of nurses working in hospitals. This may need to change. In a government-sponsored review of the UK National Health Service (NHS), Wanless (2004) described the NHS as a ‘National Sickness Service’. This observation echoes worldwide concerns that health-care services are reactive rather than proactive (World Health Organisation, WHO 1997). Wanless (2004, p. 10) argued that, ‘our health services must evolve from dealing with acute problems through more effective control of chronic conditions to promoting the maintenance of good health’. Wanless (2002) calls for people to take active responsibility for their health and, for this to be achieved, easy access to high quality health promotion advice has to be available. This has been recognized in government documents, for example, standard eight of The National Service Framework for Older People (NSFOP) (DoH 2001) has the aim to, ‘extend the healthy life expectancy of older people’ (p. 107) and underlines the need to provide equal access for older people to health promotion activities.