Running head: COMMUNITY HEALTH1
COMMUNITY HEALTH 10
Community Health Assessment
N492: Community Health Nursing 1
Community Health
Whenever it comes to medicine and maintenance, community health is an important component. The term community can be described in a variety of contexts. Generally, it refers to the part of a medical sector that is concerned with safeguarding and enhancing the overall health and wellbeing of the population, that might be a state or a rural community. Throughout the world, community health has shown to be an important and required component of high-quality treatment. To put it another way, community health refers to a broad range of medicine, whereas individual health is primarily focused on a single individual. In the New York City community health, nurses, healthcare practitioners have been focused on concerns around community health and wellness, notably in designating diverse populations or sections of communities in order to determine health requirements and developing and activating resources to address such requirements. Furthermore, previously, such requirements and the populations targeted have been restricted to governmental defined organizations (Evans‐Agnew et al., 2017). However, in the present day, the realignment of New York medical services to a more patient-centered paradigm has resulted in an increase in patients' participation in process planning, implementation, and assessment. Community health nurse of New York involves primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention of the diseases, and in such preventions, nurses play a significant role. The patients with different age groups are included within the community and patient with different age group has different medical needs, which are fulfilled by the nursing professionals.
Primary prevention
The goal of primary prevention is to avoid the illness from developing as well as to emphasize measures that will help people in living and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Its goal is to reduce the illness or malfunctioning of the people in the community. In primary prevention of the diseases, nursing professionals play a role in persuading patients to engage in preventive and suitable treatments in order to enhance their wellbeing. Moreover, primary prevention is majorly concerned with the aspects of health promotion and prevention. Giving education or awareness to an individual about their wellbeing or diet is an illustration of health promotion. Thus, any sort of instruction given by nurses that promote a healthy lifestyle qualifies as health promotion. On the contrary, the approaches adopted by the nurses that protect the patient against sickness are considered health protection (Jeet et al., 2017). For instance, in the wider community, health protection may involve immunizing people against infectious diseases during the cold season.
During the primary prevention among children in New York Community health, nurses have a vital role in conducting health campaigns, in which they encourage children to clean their teeth regularly to prevent dental caries, and diverting towards them enhanced and regular physical activity in order to avoid obesity. Education is a means of broadening one's understanding. Secondly, for the adult and older population, the nurses made the individuals of the community aware of the healthcare policies which focuses on avoiding excessive smoking as well as adopting hygienic measures such as hand washing to prevent the risk of the disease transmittance from one individual to another (Jeet et al., 2017).
Secondary prevention
Secondary prevention is referred to as the efforts such as assessment and initial identification of the disease at the early stage that help in the management of an underlying medical condition, illness, or potentially dangerous circumstance. Secondary prevention encompasses anything from prior sickness identification and management to minimizing disability by avoiding or delaying the consequences of serious illness. Timely screening happens via secondary prevention in the frame of opportunity shortly before clinical manifestations appear, allowing for early intervention and delaying the emergence of much more severe symptoms. The most prominent roles of the nurses in secondary prevention include the regular and continuous monitoring of the patients. For instance, if there are some older people in the community who have the problem of hypertension, then the nurses will regularly monitor their blood pressure and give them proper treatment according to so that the condition of the patients does not worsen (Magnani et al., 2018). Moreover, the nurses will conduct proper lab tests such as determining sugar levels in the blood, as well as other lab tests, which they consider, are important in the identification of disease before its worsening.
Tertiary prevention
The final degree of prevention that improves the quality of life is tertiary prevention. By prolonged therapy and rehabilitation, tertiary prevention relates to the individual's optimal functioning or preservation of abilities. Intervention, recuperation, quick therapies, and patient awareness are all part of this type of preventive. Tertiary preventive care is typically used when a disability or sickness cannot be cured or is permanent. It is preferable to conceive of this degree of protection as treatment rather than prevention. The ailment has already been noted during this stage, and the central emphasis is now on minimizing the disease's adverse effects and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. During this type of prevention, it is critical that the nursing staff ensures that people with impairments are receiving all the medical facilities that allow them to survive and function within the constraints of their current resources. Nurses have an important role in tertiary prevention as they are involved in providing p physical therapies, as well as cardiovascular therapy after a heart transplant, and also provide palliative care to the individuals suffering from the end stages of disease (Kirk et al., 2018). During palliative care, the nurses focus on relieving the suffering and pain of the patients by giving them counseling sessions which help in calming down their psychological distress.
Impact of political, economic, social, environmental, and cultural concerns on health
The health of the individuals within a community is significantly influenced by different factors, which include social, economic, political, environmental, and cultural. In the present day, the wave of political turmoil in several nations underlines the unstable atmosphere that vast groups of dissatisfied adolescents are navigating at the moment in their lives when vital decisions concerning personal health must be taken. Exposure to the political stressors associated with political street protests that can be violent as well as non-violent might have a negative impact on the psychological wellbeing of the adults, leading them to engage in risky behaviors that negatively impact their long-term development and progression.
In the New York City community health, the economic and financial factors are significantly affecting the healthcare and health of the individual, and thus it is becoming one of the major issues. Health is a vital issue that our community and residents of the New York Community must need. However, because of the economic limitations, not everybody in New York can access any form of a medical facility. Low-income people and destitution are much more closely linked with increased death rates as compared to the rate of unemployment. They discovered that throughout difficult economic times, rises in death are centered among the aged, especially elderly ladies in nursing facilities. Thus, the financial constraints majorly affect the health of the individuals, as the people within the community belonging to poor backgrounds are unable to get access to proper medical services and treatments, due to which the health condition of most of the people worsens (Carmona, 2019).
Culture is included among the most dominant determinants of medical choices and behaviors. Communication, both verbal and non – verbal, maintains and determines the culture of patients, and it is one of the most difficult challenges in the medical sector. Nurses engage the individual in different types of questions to learn about the patient's perspective on the condition, its etiology, and potential remedies. They pay attention to their clients and assess their degree of knowledge and capacity to continue through with the therapy. Nursing staff also communicate with the patient's relatives. However, communication differs from one culture to the next. For instance, Americans usually speak English, and they have to face a lot of difficulty due to the language barrier when treating a patient belonging to different cultural backgrounds. In such cases, sometimes, the nurses neglect such patients and give more attention to those individuals belonging to the same culture (Carmona, 2019). As a result of this, the individuals feel discrimination and lose all of their trust, ultimately leading to impact their psychological wellbeing. Thus, it shows that the economic, political, as well as social factors are all responsible for affecting the health of individuals.
Health promotion and disease prevention
Health promotion is the process of boosting and sustaining the overall health of the community and well-being through involving individuals, communities, and organizations. Intervention programs and efforts aiming at improving quality of healthcare can aid in both promoting health and illness prevention. Furthermore, using health promotion and disease preventive care, individuals can be motivated to make healthier decisions and reduce their risk of sickness and disability. They can decrease inequities in health, enhance the standard of living, and increase the accessibility of medical facilities at the community level. Prevention of disease contrasts from promoting health in that it focuses on specific actions to reduce the start and advancement of major diseases and other conditions. In health promotion and disease prevention activities, socioeconomic variables that influence potentially modifiable behaviours are routinely handled. Social elements are the financial, sociological, religious, and administrative environments wherein people are born, grow, and live. Some common actions for health promotion, ailment prevention, and wellness programs include spreading awareness about good habits through communicating. Awareness campaigns, health camps, promotion programs, and publications are all examples included in health promotions. During health promotion, education is given to increasing knowledge to encourage behavior change and activities. For this purpose, workshops, training sessions, and support networks are included among the approaches of health promotion (Ramchand et al., 2017).
Within the nursing-oriented community, health promotion initiatives must be developed to target the following health risks. increased drinking are considered to be the most dominant prevalent contributing factors associated with health promotion and illness prevention. Additionally, extra physical engagement and also nutritional adjustments should be included in health promotion techniques. Furthermore, quitting drinking is an important part of illness prevention, and limiting drinking use may be beneficial in the progression of the condition. The nurse's work in healthcare promotion might be stressful and exhausting at times, but it is ultimately rewarding. Nursing staff must fulfill a variety of duties to assure that individuals' health is promoted and maximized. Trainer, supporter, caregiver, investigator, healthcare manager, and analyst are examples of these jobs. Nurses educate individuals on how to be healthier by combining most of these duties (Ramchand et al., 2017). Nurses should have a scientific proof awareness of the considerable influence that can be achieved via health promotion activities and convey this knowledge to the general community. Nurses may help promote health in a variety of ways. Nurses serve as trainers, ensuring that patients and family members have access to the tools they need to live a healthy lifestyle. Nurses do the majority of the education, either on diet, vaccines, or illnesses. Nursing staff can also act as advocates for patients by ensuring that they receive all they are supposed to from the health sector.
Thus, it is concluded that a nurse must constantly remember to keep the patient's health and recuperation in mind. It is critical to recognize that no two people are similar to each other, and therefore, they have different healthcare needs. It is for this reason that a patient's health condition and treatment are directly impacted by their ethnicity, environmental and societal factors. The objective of primary, secondary and tertiary prevention in healthcare is for the community to embrace healthcare reform initiatives and for healthcare practitioners to observe major improvements in people's lives as a result of decreased death rates, life maintenance and extension, health recovery, and efficient population-based illness prevention. From the entire discussion, it is concluded that nurses have a significant role in the implementation of health promotion as well as disease prevention approaches, as their main focus is to make the lives of the people healthy and prevent the worsening of the condition.
References
Carmona, M. (2019). Place value: Place quality and its impact on health, social, economic and environmental outcomes. Journal of urban design, 24(1), 1-48.
Evans‐Agnew, R., Reyes, D., Primomo, J., Meyer, K., & Matlock‐Hightower, C. (2017). Community health needs assessments: Expanding the boundaries of nursing education in population health. Public Health Nursing, 34(1), 69-77.
Jeet, G., Thakur, J. S., Prinja, S., & Singh, M. (2017). Community health workers for non-communicable diseases prevention and control in developing countries: evidence and implications. PloS one, 12(7), e0180640.
Kirk, L., Terry, S., Lokuge, K., & Watterson, J. L. (2017). Effectiveness of secondary and tertiary prevention for violence against women in low and low-middle income countries: a systematic review. BMC public health, 17(1), 1-21.
Magnani, J. W., Mujahid, M. S., Aronow, H. D., Cené, C. W., Dickson, V. V., Havranek, E., … & Willey, J. Z. (2018). Health literacy and cardiovascular disease: fundamental relevance to primary and secondary prevention: a scientific statement from the American Heart Association. Circulation, 138(2), e48-e74.
Ramchand, R., Ahluwalia, S. C., Xenakis, L., Apaydin, E., Raaen, L., & Grimm, G. (2017). A systematic review of peer-supported interventions for health promotion and disease prevention. Preventive Medicine, 101, 156-170.
