Public Health Nursing Assessment

Performing a public health nursing assessment is a critical first step in determining health needs and appropriate interventions to meet them. For this assignment you perform a public health nursing assessment using the Public Health Nursing Tool (PHNAT) included in Chapter 3 of the textbook, complete an assessment on a selected population. You are free to use your setting/population of interest discussed in Topic 3 DQ1 or choose another population of interest.

Using the assessment framework provided by the PHNAT, develop a 1,250-1,500 report summarizing your assessment findings and identifying the public health needs for your selected population. Your summary should include the following:

Resources to identify and engage stakeholders, define your diverse community
Collection and analysis of data regarding diverse community health issues
Summary of how the documentation of the above could be disseminated to the community and its stakeholders
Consider the importance of preparing and providing quality care to the diverse groups within your community. Within your summary, include how you would plan improvement strategies to include a Healthy People 2020 initiative. Lastly, include steps for implementation of the improvement plans and specifics guiding an evaluation of the plan.

Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.

This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.

You are required to submit this assignment to LopesWrite. Please refer to the directions in the Student Success Center.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.

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Public Health Nursing Assessment

Introduction

Public health nursing is the practice of delivering services to help people prevent and treat disease, injury and other health problems. It can be applied to individuals as well as communities. The first step in public health nursing is a community assessment to determine the current state of health care in a particular area. This involves surveying people about their experiences with healthcare, looking at how healthy they are compared to others in their age group, what types of illnesses they have experienced over time and how effective treatment has been in solving these problems.

Survey the community to identify which health problems are most important and also to determine existing resources.

The public health nurse will survey the community to identify which health problems are most important and also to determine existing resources. The following should be considered:

What is the most serious health problem in your community?
What are people’s top three priorities for improving their health?
What funding sources do you have available for improving public health practices, including prevention programs, education efforts and health screenings (such as mammography).

Diagnose and analyze the health problems uncovered in the community assessment.

Use the information from the community assessment to help you diagnose and analyze health problems.
Look at health problems in a systematic way by using a framework that integrates all aspects of your patient’s condition.
Look at the whole picture, not just one aspect of it.

Develop a plan of action to address the health issues.

In the process of developing a plan of action, the health care professional should identify the problem. This may be difficult because it is often not something that can be observed easily by others or described in words. The health care professional should analyze the problem by asking questions such as:

What is causing this issue?
How widespread is it?
Is there a pattern to how this happens (i.e., if this happens every month, then maybe there’s something going on with your body)?

Implement the public health nursing plan of action by putting it into practice.

To implement your plan of action, you’ll need to:

Assess the community’s health status. This can be done through a number of methods, including interviews with key stakeholders and community members, questionnaires or surveys administered by your team members (and if possible, other health care providers), focus groups conducted by volunteers in the community who represent different perspectives on health issues faced by people living in that area–and so on. You may also want to recruit volunteers from among local organizations such as schools or churches who have an interest in improving public health practices within their communities.
Labeling bottles of water with labels that include information about where they came from (e.g., “purified water”), how long ago it was bottled and sold at what price point; identifying ways people can get more information about drinking water quality nearby; organizing events such as cleanup days where residents come together for fun activities while removing litter from local waterways; installing public restrooms nearby where people can relieve themselves without contaminating surrounding areas with toilet paper waste products.”

Evaluate the effectiveness of the actions taken.

The final step in an assessment is to evaluate the effectiveness of the actions taken. This can be done in several ways:

Compare actual outcomes to expected outcomes
Compare actual outcomes to previous outcomes
Identify any changes that need to be made based on these results and/or new health problems that have arisen.

There’s a process for thinking about a public health problem and planning an intervention to solve it.

The process of thinking about a public health problem and planning an intervention to solve it is called the Public Health Nursing Assessment. The steps are:

Survey the community to identify which health problems are most important.
Diagnose and analyze the health problems uncovered in the community assessment.
Develop a plan of action for addressing your findings with other members of your team, such as social workers or mental health professionals (for example). This can include: – Providing education about disease prevention; – Conducting research on how people respond to environmental changes; – Advocating for policy changes that improve access to quality healthcare services

Conclusion

We hope this exercise has shown you that planning a public health nursing intervention is not difficult, but rather it is a process of identifying a problem, developing an action plan to solve the problem, and evaluating whether the action plan is working.

Ehomeworker

Public Health Nursing Assessment