Community health nursing
For care provision to be effective in the nursing field today, people are turning more towards the provision of community-based care (Lundy, Janes & Lundy, 2016). This requires one to clearly understand the specific care needs of the community to come up with programs to meet these needs. In the paper, we are going to identify a focus area I could work on in my community, the various health risks they can are vulnerable to and how to carry out a community assessment on my focus area. Community health nursing
Identify an area of focus in community health within your own community.
The health area that I would be highly interested in my community is lifestyle improvement. Lifestyle diseases have become a major health concern in my community since we have recording a great number of diseases such as child and adult obesity, diabetes and gout among many other lifestyle diseases. The main cause of this is making wrong lifestyle choices. My interest in this area is to help provide education to the community on lifestyle choices and what they ought to avoid and therefore help reduce the number of lifestyle diseases being recorded and also ensure that they are able to access healthy food choices.
Using Gordon’s Functional Health Patterns framework (p. 130 in your e-text), assess the health risks in your community.
· Health perception-health management pattern: Individuals in the community have not embraced primary care interventions. They often seek medical care when they have already contacted diseases or when a disease is already in its chronic stages making management harder. Community health nursing
· Nutritional-metabolic pattern: Individuals are at higher risk of lifestyle disease due to the pattern of fast food consumption. The presence of so many fast foods joints has encouraged this behavior especially for the children
· Elimination pattern: No Information
· Activity-exercise pattern: Individuals are actively involved in recreation activities but have very poor physical exercise patterns. This paired with the consumption of fast food such as burgers has led to increase in obesity rates.
· Sleep-rest pattern: The community can be commended for their good sleep patterns people are found resting or asleep early enough, and this enables them to get adequate hours of sleep.
· Cognitive-perceptual pattern: Individuals in the community have good Cognitive-perceptual patterns, and this is evident through proper language development as well as memory. Community health nursing
· Self-perception–self-concept pattern: The concept of self-esteem is slowly falling for individuals in the community. This is as a result of lifestyle diseases such as obesity which people are experiencing right from a young age. This leads to the formation of negative attitudes towards self.
· Roles-relationships pattern: The family relationships are relatively weak due to the presence of several single households and this affects the level of family satisfaction and increases chances to stress and dysfunctional families which leads to some psychological effects on individuals. This could lead to poor lifestyle choices for example drug abuse.
· Sexuality-reproductive pattern: There are very few cases of individuals experiencing difficulties in their sexual functioning.
· Coping-stress tolerance pattern: Stress management is hard for individuals in the community due to lack of support systems and institutions, for example, those providing therapy. Community health nursing
· Values-beliefs pattern: Strongly affiliated to religion.
Identify resources in your community that would enable you to complete a community assessment and submit a summary of your findings (1–2 paragraphs).
The main resource that would be helpful in my assessment could be people. The people in the community would play a very major role in my assessment. First, they would serve as the source of information needed in order to learn their needs. Second, they are the individuals best suited to assist in the assessment for example in collecting data on the lifestyle of the individuals. Community health nursing
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Refer to Table 8-2: Examples of Community Strengths and Concerns, and assess the strengths and concerns of your community (2–3 paragraphs).
The main strength of our community is the growing interest in health care promotion among health leaders. Individuals have taken great interest in the various health need areas in the community and programs are already being set up to help promote health in the area. This is a sign of a brighter future in health for individuals in the society.
The community, however, falls so short of feeding programs both for older individuals as well as other different age groups in the community. This has led people to make poor feeding choices hence the lifestyle diseases. They have led to individuals having to endure their old age as they suffer chronic diseases such as heart diseases which result from bad lifestyle choices especially their consumption habits. The community has also experienced many cases of children obesity. Feeding programs are therefore needed to cater for the feeding needs of the various age groups and to ensure that they’re well informed about the lifestyle choices they make. Community health nursing
Identify potential barriers to implementing community health plans in your community and brainstorm ways of addressing these barriers (2–3 paragraphs).
The main barrier likely to be experienced is penetration to the community that is reaching out to the people to implement the plans. This is because it is a much-closed community with highly conservative individuals. It is most likely that people in the community do not see the need for lifestyle improvement and therefore they may not be readily willing to take up whatever is offered to them to improve their health.
To overcome this barrier, two strategies need to be applied. First, it is important to create awareness of the existence of a problem in the society. It is impossible to solve any problem if it has not been acknowledged. Second, it is important to work with individuals in the community to implement the plan. It is important to use the community people as a resource in implementing the plans since individuals are more likely to support and be part of the programs which the people they relate with are part of and hence breaking the wall (Nardi & Petr, 2003). Community health nursing
Conclusion
For any health care program to be effective, there is need to work not only for the people but also with the people. Individuals in the community should be made part of every process since they are the determinants of how well the objectives of the plans will be met.
References
Gordon, M. (2011). Manual of nursing diagnosis (12th ed.). Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett.
Lundy, K., Janes, S. & Lundy, K. (2016). Community health nursing: caring for the public’s health. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Nardi, D. & Petr, J. (2003). Community health and wellness needs assessment: a step-by-step guide. Clifton Park, NY: Thomson/Delmar Learning Community health nursing
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