Answer

Assignments: Community Needs Assessment and Role of Nurses

Introduction

A community needs assessment is a vital process during promotion and planning of health strategies along with care within a given community. It encompasses gathering information, analyzing the information with the goal of identifying critical health challenges with the community of study (Appleton & Cowley, 2012). A needs assessment is performed to help identify the resources and strengths that are available within a community that can help the community meet its needs for the youths, families, and children (Whitehead, 2014). Pickin and Leger (2016) point out that the purpose of a community needs assessment is to determine the weaknesses and strengths of a community and the capability of the community to respond to health campaign strategies along with planning. A needs assessment also serves to help determine the target population/group wherein the purpose of a particular health approach is aimed at. Despite the fact that a community health assessment takes different unique forms, all community needs assessments are focused on seeking information regarding the various kinds of needs of a particular community. There are six main steps involved when conducting a community health assessment. To this end, this paper will discuss the six primary steps involved when conducting a community needs assessment.

Steps to Conduct a Community Needs Assessment

There are two main goals conducting a community assessment: to help develop a well-informed comprehension of the needs or gaps that exist in a community and their influence on the members of the community (Appleton & Cowley, 2012) and to help develop a comprehensive analysis of a community’s resources or assets that are presently existing within the community and can be employed to help meet the community’s needs. To determine these, there are six steps that can be employed.

Definition of the Scope of the Assessment

Defining the scope of the assessment means being clear concerning the issues that are to be addressed. McMurray and Clendon (2015) note that community issues are intricate and one issue may be related to other several issues, it is somewhat easy to continue expanding the issues to be included in a given assessment. As such, to reduce the possibilities of expanding the scope of the assessment, the community needs to evaluated, the members of the community who will be affected, the geographical region that will be attended to, the key questions that will need to be answered, and the degree of detail of the information gathered required should be clearly spelt out in the assessment (Pickin & Leger, 2016).

Determine Collaboration.

Deciding on the scope of an assessment helps in highlighting the possible choices that are available for employment during an assessment. One can choose to carry the assessment on an individual basis or work with community partners like non-profit organizations,  corporations, local community establishments, foundations who offer grant to the community of study, government agencies, and universities (Whitehead, 2014). Among the reasons that can determine whether to collaborate or not is the resources level required for the assessment. As such, a practitioner needs to examine the effort, time, and the human resource available from different stakeholders, including volunteers, consultants, staff, and board members. Dennis and Momper (2016) point out that collaboration will serve to increase the amount and types of resources available for conducting a useful and quality needs assessment. When these partners are involved, agreements must be signed.

Collect Data

After going through the first two steps, one can begin to collect data. However, limits for data collection must be set depending on the amount of data required for the study. This is informed by the amount of time as well as resources available. McMurray and Clendon (2015) advice that one must prioritize on data gathering needs in accordance with what is vital to guarantee comprehensive community assessment before documenting the data collection efforts. It is important that the data collection process begins with secondary data sources then to primary data sources, taking care of the quality of information available in each and every secondary source. Primary data can be collected through observation, questionnaires, focus groups, case studies, and interviews.

Priorities, Findings, Actions

The process of data collection ought to result in ample information and data regarding a particular community’s assets and needs. At this stage, a practitioner/researcher analyzes the collected data to identify the key findings of the assessment, set priorities informed by the assessment’s findings, and develop an action plan that will guide post-assessment planning. Resnick (2016) suggests that for each plan, the researcher/practitioner should determine how s/he will gauge the effectiveness of the actions planned. Additionally, the action pan ought to include specific deadlines and actions and ought to identify an individual who will be responsible for every single action. As such, Dennis and Momper (2016) advice that there is need to define strategies that can be tracked over time. According to Cramer et al. (2017), key findings play a number of key roles to a needs assessment: they authenticate anecdotal proof of community assets and needs, they highlight important tendencies noted during the process of data collection, they expose dissimilarities across a community’s segments, and they assist clarify responses to the key questions of a community assessment. Important to note is that the key findings should be categorized, into strengths, opportunities, challenges, and gaps, to help summarize the collected data.

Share Findings

Once the evaluation of the gathered data has been done, there is need to allow the community, from which the data was collected, to benefit from the outcomes. Santilli et al. (2016) argue that community members are likely to be more supportive towards such assessments if they clearly understand what has been done about the data that was collected from them and of what benefit is that to their community. At this step, the researcher/practitioner shares the information gathered and proceeds to put in place an action to help address the issues noted from the study.  To enhance awareness about the findings of the study, there is need for holding community meetings where information from the study is shared to the members of the community and press briefings to enhance information distribution through various media channels. Alternatively, publication of brochures can be done to help summarize the key findings of a study as well as the action plans and information/data can be posted on web pages.

Conclusion

Needs assessment is key to unraveling strengths, opportunities, gaps, and challenges that a community has and can be employed to help improve the care of the inhabitants of the community. The process of conducting a comprehensive needs assessment follows six steps. To successfully really the import of a study, proper choices and priorities have to be made.

References

Appleton, J., & Cowley, S. (2012). The search for health needs. Basingstoke, Macmillan Press.

Cramer, G. R., Singh, S. R., Flaherty, S., & Young, G. J. (2017). The Progress of US Hospitals in Addressing Community Health Needs. American Journal of Public Health, 107(2), 255-261. 

Dennis, M. K., & Momper, S. L. (2016). An Urban American Indian Health Clinic's Response to A Community Needs Assessment. American Indian & Alaska Native Mental Health Research: The Journal of the National Center, 23(6), 15-33.

 McMurray, A., & Clendon, J. (2015). Community Health and Wellness: Primary Health Care in Practice (5th Ed.). Chatswood, NSW: Churchill Livingstone.

Pickin, C., & Leger, S. (2016). Assessing health need using the life cycle framework. Buckingham, Open University Press.

Resnick, J. J. (2016). Exploring Community Health Needs. Trustee: The Journal for Hospital Governing Boards, 69(6), 27.

Santilli, A., Carroll-Scott, A., & Ickovics, J. R. (2016). Applying Community Organizing Principles to Assess Health Needs in New Haven, Connecticut. American Journal of Public Health, 106(5), 841-847.

Whitehead, M. (2014). The concepts and principles of equity and health. International journal of health services, 22(10), 429-445.

Introduction

Nurses play a fundamental role within the health care system. The nurse profession is among the very demanding professions globally and requires a lot of commitment and dedication to the job. While most people perceive nurses as people who only oversee a shot at healthcare facilities, nurses play roles such as caregiving, communicating, teaching, decision making, managing of healthcare facilities, and advocating on behalf of patients (Balas & Boren, 2013). As a contextual basis for efficient and effective healthcare delivery, the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted the primary health care (PHC) strategy in 1978 (Wensing et al., 2016). The PHC encompasses basic curative and medical care that ought to be given to patients at the initial care level. It concentrates on preventing illness and promoting health (Alleyne & Jumaa, 2014). This approach requires nurses, and other medical practitioners, to pay attention to and address the several factors within the economic, physical, and social surroundings of people that affect health. Additionally, the PHC places the patients and citizens on an equal footing together with the health experts with regard to decision-making concerning health(Hamilton et al., 2012). As such, there are four main principles of PHC that govern the roles of nurses. These are accessibility, public participation, appropriate technology, inter-sectoral cooperation, and health promotion. To this end, this paper will critically analyze the caregiving role of nurses in connection with the principles of PHC.

Nurses play a number of roles within healthcare facilities. They act as caregivers, communicators, teachers, decision makers, managers of healthcare facilities, and patients’ advocates. However, the most familiar and well-known role of nurses is that of caregiving. As a caregiver, a nurse provides hands-on healthcare to patients in different settings, including physical needs ranging from total care to assisting a patient with ways of preventing illnesses (Redelmeier et al., 2015). Additionally, nurses maintain patients’ dignity when providing skilled and knowledgeable care. Similarly, nurses can holistically care for patients, i.e. nurses can also address developmental, cultural, psychosocial, and spiritual requirements of patients (Balas & Boren, 2013). Nonetheless, the type of care provided by nurses depends on the requirements and needs of a patient (Perry et al., 2013) since patients are at various different stages of illness. For that reason, some patients need extra attention as well as care relative to others.

Analysis of the Caregiving Role of Nurses against PHC Principles

Nurses discharge their duties in healthcare facilities that are governed by PHC principles. According to AORN (2017), PHC promotes wellness and health besides seeking to prevent illnesses and injuries. The PHC is basically concerned with how to create conditions that help people stay and become well and healthy. There are four key principle upon which care provision is, therefore, leaning on.

Accessibility.

According to this principle, there should be a universal and equal opportunities for everyone to access health services (Redelmeier et al., 2015). Everyone needs to have rational access to basic healthcare services with no geographical and financial barriers. To meet the needs of this requirement, street nurses in some countries help people (patients) with significant healthcare challenges/problems who always have the least opportunity to access healthcare facilities. These registered nurses (RNs) work jointly with street people to facilitate as well as promote individual access to healthcare services by building relationships with other healthcare providers, hospitals, and community agencies (Alleyne & Jumaa, 2014). The focus of the nurses is on how to reduce harm as a context for building trust as well as enhancing access.

Additionally, nurses in countries like South Africa serve as clinic managers as well as practitioners at community clinics visited by 200-300 nurses daily (International Council of Nurses, 2013). They supervise employees of such facilities and take records, perform physical examinations on patients, and give prescriptions. Equally, some nurses run community healthcare facilities in rural areas where they offer counselling and health education, immunize, manage diseases, and care for the aged people at home.

Community Participation

According to this principle, nurses ought to engage ad encourage the general public during decision making processes and planning (Hamilton et al., 2012). The principle is based on the concept that communities and individuals have the responsibility and right to actively partake in decision making processes regarding their healthcare along with the health of their communities (World Health Organization, 2014). Some nurses, informed by their caregiving role, employ three principles of family-patient centered care: respectful relationship, collaboration, and communication as highlighted in the Canadian Nurses Association (2015). This system functions by including families and patients is safer and provides a better experience for families, staff, and patients.

Nurses also ensure that they make efforts to secure reasonable involvement of communities in scheduling, implementation, along with maintenance of healthcare services.  For instance, if a group of community health nurses as well as environmental health experts desire to start an empowerment process within a region, then they need to jointly working with the societies of the identified area to choose village health groups  and coaching them regarding leadership skills, communication, community mobilization, as well as management of commonplace health challenges (AORN, 2017). By involving the community, the nurses will be able to get quick responses so that they can develop an action plan that will guide in resolving the challenge.

Inter-sectoral Coordination

By this principle, health experts from different sectors work interdependently with members of communities to support the health of the communities(Acduff & West, 2013). In Edmonton, a community healthcare center has been built with the contribution society stakeholders. The site includes an emergency department in the healthcare center and backs the duty of the urgent nurse practitioner with the emergency department (World Health Organization, 2014). The nurse practitioner evaluates, treats, diagnoses, discharges, and send customers with chronic and acute illness to apt healthcare services. Similarly, through the creation of collaborative associations with community partners, nursing, social, and medical work, nurse practitioner can address the preventive facets of wellness and health by referring customers to tobacco cessation centers, cardiac rehabilitation facilities, area weight loss facilities, as well as chronic illness control resources (Shuster et al., 2015).

Another example of inter-sectoral is the case the Homan Square Project in Chicago, U.S. that provides packages of PHC services with the aim of bettering the quality of life for the people in an upcoming inner-city society (Government of Canada, 2014). Some of the care services offered here are family education, counselling programs, PHC clinic, screening services, among others. The project depends on nurse practitioner faculty in fields like prenatal care, school nursing, women’s health, mental health, and parenting skills and offers an exceptional chance for the interface of academic education and service delivery as noted by the International Council of Nurses (2013).

Appropriate Technology

According to this principle, modes and technologies employed by nurses ought to be based upon healthcare needs and should be adapted appropriately to the community’s economic, cultural, and social development (Acduff & West, 2013). Additionally, this principle requires nurses to employ medical technologies that are feasible, affordable, and culturally accepted by communities and individuals (Rosenhaur et al., 2014). For instance, in Papua New Guinea, a nurse-held primary healthcare center provides services in one remote area that has high rate of HID/AIDS. The nurses took a study to identify the key stakeholders in 14 villages to help increase HIV/AIDs awareness. They employ community-based open-air remote dissemination systems, shortwave radio services, and local dailies to highlight the services that they offer and to deliver health information (Gadd & Collins, 2016). Additionally, they provide remote clinical services in each and every village besides conducting workshops on HIV/AIDS. Similarly, they work with the members of the community on prevention as well as other PHC topics like diabetes, prenatal care, hypertension, and immunization, among others.

Furthermore, Health Link Alberta, which is a 24 hour-a-day and 7-day-RN telephone advice as well as health information service. High experienced RNs provide callers with information and advice regarding health symptoms along with concerns that family members or an individual may be experiencing (Shuster et al., 2015). Equally, Health Link can help callers get apt services as well as health information.

Apart from the four discussed principles of PHC, there is also another principle referred to as health promotion. According to this principle, nurses must always endevour to help people better their lives/health and increase control over their individual health (Gadd & Collins, 2016).

Conclusion

Everything regarding healthcare is complex. There are complex healthcare technologies, complex patient needs as well as responses to particular therapeutic interventions, complex processes, and complex organizations. As such, there are a number of challenges and opportunities that are encountered by medical practitioners when they try to improve the quality as well as safety of patients and healthcare. Nonetheless, by employing the PHC principles to the letter, it has empirically been established that nurses can easily realize their roles.