Öz
Creating and maintaining a healthy lifestyle is one of the most important stages of protection from diseases. For his, it is necessary to develope healthy lifestyle behavior. Developing behavior towards a healthy lifestyle can prevent many diseases. In this sense, the aim of this study was to investigate the healthy lifestyle behaviors of general surgery patients according to various characteristics of patients. For the purpose, Healthy Lifestyle Behaviors Scale II developed by Walker and Hill-Polerecky (1996) and adapted to Turkish by Bahar vd. (2008) was applied to 373 patients visiting the general surgery polyclinic of a training and research hospital. The scale has 6 dimensions. These dimensions are; health responsibility, spiritual growth, physical activity, nutrition, interpersonal relations and stress management. SPSS program was used in the analysis of the obtained data and ANOVA, Kruskal Wallis-H and independent sample t tests were performed. In addition, post-hoc tests such as LSD and Tamhane t2 test were used to determine the difference between the groups. It was found that general surgery patients' healthy lifestyle behaviors differed by age, gender, marital status, educational status, occupational status, having easy access to health care services, alcohol use status, presence of a chronic disease, medication use status, solution-seeking behaviour when faced with health problems, and their belief that they lead a healthy lifestyle. Developing policies for general surgery patients to develop healthy lifestyle behaviors may improve these patients’ quality of life and contribute to reduce health care expenditures.