Promoting Community Health: Achieving Safety & Risk Reduction - Essay Sample

Introduction

Community health promotion is an essential activity that underpins a safe living environment free from pathogenic infections. All community stakeholders have to promote such an activity as a way of ensuring community safety and reduction of risks related to controllable disease outbreaks. A community, in this case, refers to every member who has an interest in their locality and can be: people who reside, work, or volunteer in a given common locality. American Nursing Association (2011) argues that the sole responsibility and aim of community health promotion is to ensure the safety of people through instilling of nursing-related knowledge and skills to community members, which enhances healthy practices. The principle purpose of this research proposal is to conduct agency visits and community health promotion and enhanced risk reduction associated with diabetes in Silver Spring, Maryland, through questionnaires, interviews, and surveys.

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Identification of Community Needs

Every community has needs. However, such needs vary from one community to another depending on a variety of factors that include: health status, economic status, political aspects, and social status. All these factors have acute variation and differ in intensity in an individual community. Community health care status is among these critical factors which determine community needs and needs to be addressed with the utmost levels of seriousness. Moreover, community needs affect divers demographics within a given area. There is a specific group of people who are severely affected by diabetic conditions under study within Silver Spring, Maryland, and the data collection of such a population is done through windshield surveys, ecomap, and agency interviews. Statistical data collected from the patients at the Holy Cross community health care facility related to diabetes were recorded in various forms (Marcus-Varwijk et al., 2020).

The community of Silver Spring is large and seems developed. Since it is large, it allows the community to provide a wide variety of services and space for recreational uses. The people in this community seem to observe hygiene, considering that in the open spaces, the environment is clean with negligible amounts of pollutants. There are numerous public parks inside Silver Spring neighborhoods. However, there are a lot of remnants and depositions in the neighboring parks. The parts are not suitable for use at night because they are not well lit. Elderly and young populations within the community play soccer on the Open field of Eastern Middle School, Montgomery Blair High School, and Montgomery Knolls. On Sligo creek road, there is a private golf course. There are three community trails, which are the Sligo Creek trail, east and west Burnt mills park trail.

Data Collection Techniques

Some of the data collection tools used in the research are listed as follow:

• Windshield Survey
• Interviews
• Ecomap

Windshield Survey

A windshield survey is an informal type of healthcare-related survey in which the surveyors conduct around a given area of interest mainly around a given geographical locality or a community by driving around such an area. All the observations and data collected by this type of survey are then recorded for analysis.

The community has two major hospitals in the Silver Spring region, which makes many departments to support the quality of care. The major hospital, Holy Cross Hospital, is near the neighborhood of Forest Glen Road. The white oak hospital was opened five months ago to improve medical services in the community. The quality of care in this community can be enhanced through the establishment of urgent care centers that operates for 24 hours. Having one major hospital and one nursing home in Silver Spring can make the ED and other departments overflow. More people mean the longer the wait time.

This can hinder the quality of care. When wait times are longer, people become impatient and may leave no matter how sick they feel and never get the medical help they need CDC health data resources provide the three leading causes of death in this community. The issue of overweight and smoking is two conditions increasing cases of chronic diseases. To address this issue, the community needs to have more smoking cessation programs. Besides, nutrition classes should be offered in the community to address obesity. Proper nutrition can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and help maintain diabetes. As for cancer, the community needs to provide earlier screenings for earlier detection and treatment ("Silver Spring, MD," n.d.).

Interviews

An interview with Margarette Acevero, Diabetes program coordinator at holy cross community health, was conducted, and results recorded. According to Margarette, the agency is a nonprofit service, reaches out to as many people as possible. The main goal is to reduce the rate of hospital admission, which can save the community and hospital money. Interview questions enable the acquisition of adequate information about the effects and intensity of diabetic situations in the area.

• How do the members of the agency work together as an interdisciplinary team?
• Are there any community partnerships with other agencies?
• What is the most critical community health need, and how has the agency addressed this need?

Ecomap

Ecomaps are data collection and presentation tools that entail the use of interrelated and highly connected diagrammatic parameters. They are diagram type of data provision tools that gives the position of a family or individual in a society regarding the subject matter of the research. Data obtained from ecomap indicates that the level of diabetes-related complications around the Holy Cross health care facility is relatively high.

Epidemiology of the Community Need

Based on the findings obtained from the data collection tools used, it is clear that there are quite a lot of epidemiological requirements for the community. The prevalence of diabetes in Maryland diffuses into different parties within the community as the research feedback indicates that there is a great diversity in the community. It is made up of different people of diverse races hence giving individual diabetes prevalence the highest being 41% and the lowest being 0.02%. Whites are the most affected population according to interview responses, which places them at the highest and native Hawaiians taking the last position in the ranking. Communities around the Holy Cross community health facility need more sensitization programs and disease awareness. This because statistics obtained from interviews, windshield surveys, and ecomap indicate that higher percentage lies on directly affected people hence calling for mechanisms of reducing the spread of diabetes. Lifestyle has been cited by Holy Cross community health care as among the leading causes of diabetes in the area.

Proper choice of food is one of the preventive measures where people would choose the best nutritional content diet, which lowers the risks of developing diabetes. Foods of these types are mainly free from sugar and other strong starchy nutrients. Diabetic condition prevalence is on the rise because of poor eating habits of most of the population under interest. They like eating sugary and other foods which have high starch concentrations. A wide range of clinical lifestyle topics is contained in the self-management educational programs. They offer to change of social norms as a mitigation approach as a way of reducing diabetic complication risks in the community (Cislaghi et al., 2019). They also enhance the promotion of health concerns and medical skills of dealing with any healthcare-related complications that might arise. Therefore, the epidemiological requirements to deal with the current prevalence of diabetes cases in Maryland are mainly nursing processes that entail evidence-based practices.

Literature Review

Community health promotion and risk reduction strategies are vital practices necessary for any society to minimize pathogenic infection cases. Risk prevention measures need underpinning from individual and group-based contributions, which enables disease-related complications reduced in a given community (Myers, Wolfer, & Hogan, 2017). Diabetes is one of the most prevalent health care implications which affect people across all age-groups. Unfortunately, this situation is caused by types of food such as starch ad sugary in which they are the presence of most people due to several reasons. Because these food types are carbohydrates, many people would like to consume such variety for the provision of adequate energy hence ending up developing diabetic complications when the concentration of such nutrients (glucose) goes higher than usual. EvansAgnew et al. (2017) assert that the community needs nutritional education through the expansion of nursing lesson skills to accommodate the community members.

Application of Nursing Process in Assessing Family and Community Health Systems

Nursing processes are useful in assessing family and community health systems because they reveal all possible characteristics necessary. The latter method is crucial for health care operation dealing with diabetic complications as per the Centers for Disease Control. Holy Cross medical agency, according to the managing director Margarette gets funding from the community, which are the main drivers of the nursing processes. Nursing process applicable in the community health care agency are mainly patient-related responses. The patients give and rate the service delivery about the expectations of diabetic-related complications and how the practitioners handle the matter.

Risk Reduction and Health Promotion Education Plans

Risk reduction practices are the main parameters in community health promotion. Such methods are the main drivers towards attaining the desired community health status, which will make the stakeholders less vulnerable to disease infections. Some of the approaches used in achieving this are community education on a matter related to diabetes. According to Margarette, Holy Cross Community health care facility offers a wide range of educational and diabetes prevention services, which vary from dietary and nutritional programs and body fitness programs. Such programs are categorized into two main groups, which are diabetes self-management programs and diabetes prevention programs (Marcus-Varwijk et al., 2018). Holy Cross Health's diabetes prevention education programs have played a key role in enlightening the community around it in sensitizing them on diabetes-related complications and preventive measures.

Diabetes prevention education programs are conducted in a cycle of one year. During this annual cycle, there is a rigorous educative program runs for 12 months. Throughout this cycle of programs, participants get access to the assistant and protective mechanisms by highly-trained lifestyle diabetes tutors. Some of these approaches to diabetes prevention are weight management, engagement in physical activities, proper choice of healthy food, and understanding of risk causing factors.

The findings of the research indicate that diabetes is high on white races and lowest in Native Hawaiians. Statistics ranks the results in a percentage ranging from 0.02% to 41%. Therefore, community health promotion and risk reduction ensure the attainment of a society that is free from pathogenic infections.

Identification of Available Resources

Data collection strategies used, such as windshield su...