Posted: March 12th, 2023

Practicum Assignments

Discussion

Overview: As a community of practice, your task for this week is to collaborate with professionals across the health care system. With your community of practice, in the Discussion, find a gap in care or social determinant that often results in poor health care outcomes. You will begin to take the lead in advocating for and collaborating with others to improve the health care outcomes for populations at risk.

Practicum Discussion: During this week, you will identify a population at risk in your community. This population will be the basis for your Practicum Discussions and your individual presentations over the next 6 weeks, as well as the focus of your final PowerPoint presentation in Week 6. To review, a population is a group of individuals who share a common environmental or personal characteristic, such as obese individuals who are at risk for diabetes or cardiovascular disease (populations at risk) or those individuals who are otherwise healthy and could stay healthy if they do not develop risky behaviors (populations of interest). An example of this is teenagers who don’t yet smoke but might consider it due to peer pressure (Stanhope & Lancaster, 2020). Some of the topics you might consider are vaccination compliance, obesity rates among children and adults, teenage pregnancy, or infectious diseases such as Norwalk virus, genital warts, or sexually transmitted diseases/infections. You might look also at emerging public health problems such as Chagas or the Zika virus. Some of the places you might consider looking for information to substantiate and support your ideas about populations at risk in your communities are your local health department, the CDC, and the many evidence-based websites that the CDC supports, such as the CDC Wonder (http://wonder.cdc.gov/). You may also review the work of other community groups that focus on improving health care outcomes for your community. You should begin to support your selection of population and ideas about their health care problems through the use of health data and scholarly literature.

Post your response to the following:

· Briefly describe your community and then describe your practice setting.

· What are the determinants of health in your community? (https://health.gov/healthypeople/priority-areas/social-determinants-health)

· What are the most prevalent health problems in your community or in your practice?

· Choose a population at risk and describe the health problem specific to that population. Remember that you will have to define the population’s age, culture, religious beliefs, foods, and traditions eventually as your project progresses.

Support your response with references from professional nursing literature.

Read two or more of your colleagues’ postings from the Discussion question. As a community of practice, help each other refine and clarify the health problem remembering that this project focuses on primary prevention strategies at the community and system level of care.

Respond to at least two colleagues. Your responses should be substantial and should contribute ideas, tools, alternate points of view, resources, and information related to identified health problems.

Romina Alejandra Dana

My community is of a diverse social and ethnic background.  It is mostly comprised of African Americans descend, obese, and elderly patients as well as lower socioeconomic status young women and single mothers seeking help for STDs.

I have chosen the issue of hypertension at this time because I believe is on the top of the triangle coming down to many other branches as a consequence of many medical issues including strokes and heart disease. My goal for this class is working towards the awareness of the end results of hypertension and how to decrease the incidence of it by alternating with non-medical interventions as well. 

It is my believe that hypertension mostly appears with chaotic and worrisome thinking, and with anger. Stress hormones like corticosteroids produce the narrowing of the blood vessels making the heart having to pump blood even harder to supply the entire body of nutrients, which in turn will conclude in many problems of the blood vessels an all its mechanism of action. Meditation and therapeutic talk with a life coach for example, especially on those populations at risk: women after 45 years old, African American, and overweight people, should consider a different lifestyle, like more tranquility, and a better diet before we prescribe hypertensive medication.

According to the website heart.org in most cases heart damage from hypertension occurs overtime and to name a few these damages would include heart attack, stroke, heart failure, kidney disease, vision loss, sexual disfunction, angina, and peripheral artery disease. Unfortunately, when the blood pressure is high for very long time, LDL starts accumulating in the vessel causing the narrowing of the holes where the blood pumped from the heart need to flow.

Summary

By promoting a healthy lifestyle, with peaceful thought to our hectic and anxious daily living, and a diet without mono and polysaturated fats, and cutting out on carbohydrates this can help us to control the accumulation of bad cholesterol on our blood vessels, and as the end result have a much better outcome.

Citation

American Heart association (2023) heart.org

Carrie E Baines

   Within the community I live in and work in we see a lot of health issues related to obesity. We are in the south and partake in southern style cooking. When speaking to people working in the community, they assured me that obesity is a huge concern. Being obese can cause cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, musculoskeletal disorders, and some cancers (World Health Organization, 2013). Some of these diagnosis is irreversible and will increase costs for the individual and health care system. Nationally 41.9 % of adults suffer from obesity (Trust for America’s Health, 2022). African American adults rank 49.9%, Hispanic adults rank 45.6%, Caucasian adults rank 41.4, and Asian adults ranked 16.1% (Trust for America’s Health, 2022). It was also reported that rural areas of the country were higher than suburban areas. I would be within this rural country classification. These numbers could be decreased, and issues caused by obesity reduced with education.  

     There are several determinants that influence obesity rates such as poverty, housing stability, lack of access to healthcare, and discrimination to name a few (Trust for America’s Health, 2022). When thinking about poverty, the individuals feel the need to use their income for other means than health. I feel like some may put this to the wayside or feel it is unimportant. This is where we fail. Early education on nutrition and wellness should increase. This can also go along with lack of education or housing stability. It just is not a focus and therefore our youth is not taught it is important.  

     To decrease these numbers, I feel like we need to educate our youth. They need to be educated on how obesity can affect them later in life. Sometimes maybe sooner than later. It appears minorities and poverty will predispose youth to the risk of obesity. The statistics listed above were for adults but I am looking at preventing and decreasing these numbers. This will hopefully decrease those increased health effects obesity can cause.  

References  

Trust for America’s Health. (2022). 
State of Obesity 2022: Better Policies for a Healthier America. Tfah. 

https://www.tfah.org/report-details/state-of-obesity-2022/#:~:text=Nationally%2C%2041.9%20percent%20of%20adultsLinks to an external site.

World Health Organization. (2013, March 14). 
Obesity: Health consequences of being overweight. 

Www.who.intLinks to an external site.

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https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/obesity-health-consequences-of-being-overweight#:~:text=Carrying%20extra%20fat%20leads%20toLinks to an external site.