Health Promotion Plan
Develop a hypothetical health promotion plan, 3-4 pages in length, addressing a specific health concern for an individual or a group living in the community that you identified from the topic list provided.
Bullying.
Teen Pregnancy.
LGBTQIA + Health.
Sudden Infant Death (SID).
Immunization.
Tobacco use (include all: vaping, e-cigarettes, hookah, chewing tobacco, and smoking) cessation.
Historically, nurses have made significant contributions to community and public health with regard to health promotion, disease prevention, and environmental and public safety. They have also been instrumental in shaping public health policy. Today, community and public health nurses have a key role in identifying and developing plans of care to address local, national, and international health issues. The goal of community and public health nursing is to optimize the health of individuals and families, taking into consideration cultural, racial, ethnic groups, communities, and populations. Caring for a population involves identifying the factors that place the population’s health at risk and developing specific interventions to address those factors. The community/public health nurse uses epidemiology as a tool to customize disease prevention and health promotion strategies disseminated to a specific population. Epidemiology is the branch of medicine that investigates causes of various diseases in a specific population (CDC, 2012; Healthy People 2030, n.d.).
As an advocate and educator, the community/public health nurse is instrumental in providing individuals, groups, and aggregates with the tools that are essential for health promotion and disease prevention. There is a connection between one’s quality of life and their health literacy. Health literacy is related to the knowledge, comprehension, and understanding of one’s condition along with the ability to find resources that will treat, prevent, maintain, or cure their condition. Health literacy is impacted by the individual’s learning style, reading level, and the ability understand and retain the information being provided. The individual’s technology aptitude and proficiency in navigating available resources is an essential component to making informed decisions and to the teaching learning process (CDC, 2012; Healthy People 2030, n.d.).
It is essential to develop trust and rapport with community members to accurately identify health needs and help them adopt health promotion, health maintenance, and disease prevention strategies. Cultural, socio-economical, and educational biases need to be taken into consideration when communicating and developing an individualized treatment and educational plan. Social, economic, cultural, and lifestyle behaviors can have an impact on an individual’s health and the health of a community. These behaviors may pose health risks, which may be mitigated through lifestyle/behaviorally-based education. The environment, housing conditions, employment factors, diet, cultural beliefs, and family/support system structure play a role in a person’s levels of risk and resulting health. Assessment, evaluation, and inclusion of these factors provide a basis for the development of an individualized plan. The health professional may use a genogram or sociogram in this process.
What is a genogram? A genogram, similar to a family tree, is used to gather detailed information about the quality of relationships and interactions between family members over generations as opposed to lineage. Gender, family relationships, emotional relationships, lifespan, and genetic predisposition to certain health conditions are components of a genogram. A genogram, for instance, may identify a pattern of martial issues perhaps rooted in anger or explain why a person has green eyes.
What is a sociogram? A sociogram helps the health professional to develop a greater understanding of these factors by seeing inter-relationships, social links between people or other entities, as well as patterns to identify vulnerable populations and the flow of information within the community.
References
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2012). Lesson 1: Introduction to epidemiology. In Principles of Epidemiology in Public Health Practice (3rd ed.). https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson1/section1.html
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. (n.d.). Healthy People 2030. https://health.gov/healthypeople
Sample Answer
Analyze a Community Health Concern or Need that is the Focus of a Health Promotion Plan
Bullying refers to a pattern of aggressive behavior in which an individual or a group of individuals in a position of authority purposefully intimidates or coerces another individual with the objective of physically or emotionally harming that individual. Bullying can take the form of physical or verbal acts. Many adolescents can be cruel as they develop social skills and mature into adults (Rees et al., 2020). This paper will focus on bullying among young people (teenagers) and how health promotion can curb the increasing number of cases of buying among this population.
The main target for this health promotion plan will be teenagers in a school setting. While children and youth are generally at increased risk, other factors increase their vulnerability to being bullied or becoming bullies, for example, those with different sexual orientations, including lesbians, gays or bisexual teens, youths with disabilities, and socially delayed youths. Generally, those perceived to be different from others are usually at increased risk of being bullied. The youths/young people constitute 13% of the US population, approximately 41 852 832 children and teenagers aged between 10-19 years. Females make up approximately 51% of this population, while 49% are males. Approximately 86% of this population lives within metropolitan areas, while 8% live in micropolitan areas and only 5% live in rural areas. In 2019, the average national median income for households with children was determined to be $78,00; households with only one spouse median income was $31,035, for those headed by women, and $48,083 for those headed by a man (United States Census Bureau, 2020).
Why is the health concern important and why the chosen population is predisposed to this health concern?
Bullying has been identified as a major public health concern in today’s society, especially among teenagers. Bullying can take many forms, including physical bullying, which involves hitting and pushing an individual, cyberbullying where people use digital platforms to send hurtful or degrading messages to others; relational bullying, which involves exclusion of a person from a group and verbal bullying, which comprises of yelling and making negative remarks and abusive words towards another person (Rees et al., 2020).
A major focus on bullying among teenagers and children in school is the health impacts bullying has on a person’s mental and physical well-being. The victims of bullying have been shown to suffer from mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. They are also likely to experience other health issues such as eating disorders, headaches, abdominal pain, fatigue, and disturbed sleep patterns (Hansson et al., 2020). Impacts of bullying in the academic area include poor performance evidenced by low test scores, increased dropout rates, poor concentration in class, and poor attendance. Those who perpetrate bullying have been shown to have an increased risk of drug abuse, such as tobacco smoking, they also exhibit poor performance in school and have a poor perception of the school environment, and they are also at increased risk of developing mental health disorders and getting involved in criminal activities. Therefore, bullying has significant negative impacts on the well-being of the victims and perpetrators and requires to be addressed (Ringdal et al., 2020).
The main assumption why some teenagers tend to be bullies is that they have low self-esteem or are loners. However, research has shown that other underlying factors predispose teenagers to bullying behavior. Teenagers are more predisposed to bullying because, at this age, they are still growing and learning to live with others; most of them have not yet developed a personal identity, and therefore in search of discovering themselves, some adopt behaviors such as bullying to fit in with peer groups and establish an identity for themselves. Several factors cause teenagers to be bullies, including the need to gain popularity and have power over their friends and agemates, revenge, especially those that have been victims of bullying or abuse, and to cope with problems at home, for example, teenagers from abusive homes are likely to be bullies (Rees et al., 2020).
Discuss what you would include in the Development of a Sociogram
A sociogram refers to a tool that can chart relationships within a group to represent various relationships and links between individuals within the group. Some important information that should be included in developing a sociogram for this target population includes social links; bullying is related to the number of friends or social groups a person belongs to. Economic considerations would include the neighborhood since they can influence a person’s behavior and lifestyle. Another consideration will be ethnicity/cultural background since teenagers from specific ethnic groups are more likely to be bullied, especially when they are the minority (Korsavi & Sadoughi, 2020).
Health Promotion Plan Goals
Goals are essential since they provide a sense of direction and assess whether their efforts are propelling them towards the future they desire. In health, promotion goals assist in designing health education strategies that effectively stimulate the desired behavior change. The goals of this health promotion plan include; by the end of this health promotion activity, the students/participants will be able to identify and explain the different forms of bullying. The participants will be able to explain the impacts of bullying on a person’s life. The participants will be able to identify actions to take to deal with bullying. The participant will identify avenues to report bullying cases and resource centers where they can seek help when they are bullied (Korsavi & Sadoughi, 2020).
