[Health promotion as a political decision in nursing education]

It is a descriptive-exploratory study with a qualitative approach that has the objective of analyzing the health promotion in training nurses. The setting of the research was two nursing undergraduate courses in the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The results show that both schools used settings favorable to a health promotion approach in this training. They anchor this approach in the need to provide students experiences of learning from an immersion in the reality of professional life. It is prevalent on formation a tension between good educational pratices for health promotion were revealed those become into the daily of the service and practices that arrest the subjects on their ways of thinking. It is concluded that health promotion is recognized as a political decision in nursing education, although this is yet incipient and has a mixed theoretical formulation, indicating the need to increase opportunities for conceptual and operational discussion.