Objective:

Identify the areas of application of nursing health counseling, and its limitations.

Materials and Methods:

Integrative literature review; the search of the studies was performed in the following databases: Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, ClinicalKey, OVID, CINAHL, and Proquest. Articles that were published in the period from 2012 to 2021 were located in the following languages: Spanish, English, and Portuguese, which included in the title and/or abstract any of the following descriptors: “Nursing health counseling”, “Health promotion”, “Patient-Centered care”, “Nurse-patient relationships”, with the Boolean operator “AND”.

Results:

Eleven articles met the inclusion criteria and were assessed. Key findings were identified and categorized into topics. In the results, two categories are shown: a) strategies to provide nursing health counseling and b) limitations of nursing health counseling.

Conclusions:

The application scope of nursing health counseling is broad within primary health care, both for the promotion of health and for the self-care of people with various pathologies; with respect to limitations, it is necessary to have trained nursing personnel.