Health Literacy and Patient Safety: Environmental Concerns on Infants

Infantry is a very important stage in life. As an early stage, the human race depends on the environmental stability for their development (Garbutt, Leege, Sterkel, Gentry, Wallendorf, & Strunk, 2012). Mother Nature is the provider of food, air, and water among other necessities that children need to grow and develop properly. Bearing the fact that infant stage is important and usually involves a lot of possible crisis, there is a need to look more into it and how and why these challenges might occur and the best way through which these possible challenges can be done away with (Gray, 2011). At the very young stage in human life, there are a lot of active activities that are carried out in order to facilitate growth and development. The environment provides the essentials of infant survival while human interferences lead to a hazardous effect on the environment that impact the survival of children.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Sufficient supply of food, water, and clean air is important for the development of infants; At the very infant stages, metabolism is quite high. Therefore, children are usually very active. They usually like to move around and play a lot hence making them seem to be very active (O'Keeffe, & Clarke-Pearson, 2011). In as much as there is quite a lot of activities being carried out, there are also risks involved with the same provision because with their most playful nature, accidents are most likely to happen and there can be a number of things that can easily affect the well-being of an infant and might even threaten the mere existence of the infant at the end of the day. By getting to see the most pecks related to the environmental connection to the infants and how they affect the infants requires that people look for a way out, through which, these issues and challenges can be explored. There can be a clear insight on how they are brought about and how they can handle in one way or another. Infants are most susceptible to various attacks because of their young age and the way they are still actively trying to grow in one way or another (World Health Organisation. 2010). Therefore, because of their tender age and the young bodies and immunities, they are also rather weak when it comes to getting attacks and other issues. Furthermore, this is indeed a big issue, and there is a need for in-depth research on the same (Gray, 2011).

Health risk of the environment to the children is a cause for worry. When in contact with the man, there are a lot of possible health risks that may be posted. This even gets worse when it comes to infants because these effects are easier to penetrate and much easier to bring out more challenges than the previous perceived ones. With the very high radiation rates in various industries, there are more than the known risks that are just but looming around each and every other day. For children, getting illnesses and complications are easily gotten hence making it one very risky peck that has to be looked at (World Health Organisation. 2010). Even though radiation just clicks on cancer, there are a lot of body functions that are aligned with the same, and they have a very high risk of causing more harm especially during growth and even distortion of the norm especially with the continuing growth of the same. Today, there are a lot of diseases that have been linked to radiation, and they are quite disturbing since the rate is on the rise.

Human interference leads to environmental degradation that leads to loss of biodiversity and human means of survival. There are a lot of environmental factors that can be a big hindrance to the well-being of man, especially the infants. Nature has been made in such a way that it is able to sustain and work towards having the living things around it to be able to balance these together. The man has, however, has destroyed the environment. Hence, Mother Nature is reacting to that (Garbutt et al., 2012). It is because of that that global warming and other issues have been on the rise lately that children die of hunger in most of the developing countries. Technology has made it in such a way that there is a lot of industrialization going on and hence because of the high emissions, there is also a lot of pollution going on. With the high pollution rate, there are high risks especially when this happens in areas close to the infants. In the world today, there are a lot of emissions that have brought more and more problems to mother earth. However, these emissions are also well known to cause a lot of radiations, something that is really harmful to the cells (Garbutt et al., 2012).the

Another reason for infant health risks from the environment is ignorance of the parents. Parents and guardians should be on the lookout for radiation and other pollution mechanisms in order for them to evade the possible risks that are most likely to cause harm to these infants. The best way to go about this would be to reduce their exposure to harmful rays and even try to make sure that these children are able to get access to clean and fresh air so that they can be able to evade the possible risks looming out there (O'Keeffe, & Clarke-Pearson, 2011). Smoke emission, on the other hand, does a lot of harm when it comes to the respiratory system especially when at a still very tender age. Getting to raise infants in a harmonized environment yet composed with possible easy and smooth environments is the best mode to ensure that these infants are assured of quality growth and that they are able to get access to the best growth environments.

Conclusion

In summary, there are a lot of environmental factors that are easily able to pose as risks to infants. However, getting to look into them and understand how they work and how best they can be carried out to evade harming infants is key. With the very tender infant age and the heavy metabolic rates, there is indeed a lot that has to be done to make sure that the environment through which a child is raised is good enough to ensure that they are secured from the possible hazardous pecks that have been brought out.

References

AMA Foundation. (2010). Health Literacy and Patient Safety: Help Patients Understand [Video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/cGtTZ_vxjyA

Garbutt, J. M., Leege, E., Sterkel, R., Gentry, S., Wallendorf, M., & Strunk, R. C. (2012). What are parents worried about? Health problems and health concerns for children. Clinical Pediatrics, 51(9), 840-847.

Gray, A. (2011). WHO Essential Medicines List for Children. Pediatric Drugs, 13(4), 209-211. doi: 10.2165/11589090-000000000-00000.

O'Keeffe, G. S., & Clarke-Pearson, K. (2011). Clinical Report-the Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families. Pediatrics, peds-2011.

World Health Organisation. (2010). Persistent organic pollutants: impact on child health. Apps.who.int.