Research Paper on Improving Healthcare Outcomes for At-Risk Hispanic Population

Introduction

The gap in nursing practice within public health teams is the lack of knowledge of best evidence-based practices with this specific at-risk population. There have been concerns about the high infection rate of HIV and (AIDS) among Hispanics in the United States. There have been concerns that Hispanic men and women are not having HIV diagnosed at an early stage when compared to other races. According to Lopez-Quintero et al. (2016), Hispanics are more likely to delay their HIV testing until the emergence of an AIDS-defining illness.

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The purpose of this quality improvement project is to do a systematic review of the literature and the outcomes of HIV/AIDS public health programs targeting the Hispanic population in the western United States. The profile of the Hispanic HIV/AIDS population on the East Coast is more likely to be associated with intravenous drug use, and the origins of the community are more likely to be Puerto Rican than Mexican and Central Americans that populate the Southwest (Lopez-Quintero et al. 2016). The practice-focused question is, "what are the successful programs of HIV/AIDS public health intervention that can inform community workers on best practice for the California Hispanic population?" This systematic review will be presented to public health and community health workers to better inform them about ways to improve success in outreach and intervention to this population.

Nature of the Doctoral Project

The literature review will be conducted from home in Southern California near the US-Mexico border. Online databases, including NIH, CINHAL, EBSCO, and PubMed, may be used as the primary sources of research information. At the same time, books and peer-reviewed journals obtained from Google scholar comprise the secondary sources of information. The research will also look to data from community health intervention programs that may not have published in the research literature but serve as programs, which can be analyzed for best practices, such as the Southern California Border HIV/AIDS program (Scolari, 2006). The review will also look at the information on the projects that may be reported in professional meetings or on websites that have not been published in professional journals. I will reach out to program directors at the CDC for leads on additional projects that may be funded. I will also reach out to the state health departments in California, New Mexico, and Arizona for information about on-going programs.

The procedural steps will involve a systematic review of the literature and publicly available websites and databases. For this study, the problem revolves around the need to encourage Hispanics in the Southwestern United States to get screened for HIV regularly to reduce the colossal infection rate and for early treatment to reduce the probability of death due to AIDS-related illnesses. In a systematic review, the first step consists of identifying the research question, which is finding the best practices that can be implemented in community health nursing to encourage Hispanics to get regular HIV screening as well as early treatment. A review protocol will then be created, involving and the production of a review protocol template which discusses the key attributes of the research. Aspects such as conceptual discussion of the problem, review questions, search strategy, the criteria of including and excluding studies, the procedure of extracting data, data synthesis procedure, and record-keeping will be incorporated into that protocol. Studies on HIV infections, treatment, and healthcare among Hispanics will be included, while studies on HIV infection for studies conducted outside the United States and Mexico will be excluded. The next step involves working a thorough literature review of sources that identify what past studies have observed on this topic. In a systematic review, references are very vital as a source of evidence, and a search on online databases, journals, and websites of public health programs can provide adequate sources for this study. The studies will then be selected...