Community Health in Nursing One

Community Health in Nursing

One of the principle aspects of the employment of a nurse is fostering a sense of community health. The nursing industry can actually play a fairly substantial role in encouraging the development of community health awareness and implementing programs that facilitate the awareness of issues germane to a particular community. In the South Florida community of Miami, for example, there are a number of health issues that people in this part of the region need to be aware of. One of the most eminent is the high rate of contraction of sexually transmitted diseases, which is due in no small part to the immense heterogeneity that characterizes this population subset. Furthermore, the proclivity of young people to incur these diseases is significantly higher than that of older people, which is why nursing programs focusing on community awareness should ideally concentrate on this particular demographic.

The high rate of incidence of sexually transmitted diseases can be severely mitigated through the deployment of encouraging youth to get tested for various diseases. Doing so would allow this portion of the population to become aware of its particular status regarding the spread and contagion of diseases, which would enable it to act accordingly and more responsibly in order to curtail further dissemination of such diseases. To that end, it would greatly behoove young people to proactively avoid the spread of these diseases by coming and getting tested on their own. Additionally, nurses can have a direct impact on the future health of people in the Miami community by handing out condoms at health care facilities where people are tested. Properly utilizing condoms and other forms of safe sex can greatly reduce the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases and infections. The dissemination of these materials in health care facilities in which youth are tested would immensely aid the prospects of community health in Miami.

Nursing students and healthcare professionals in general will likely see a big change occurring to the health care industry now that the Supreme Court has approved the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The most salient of these changes, of course, will occur in 2014 when health ensure will be mandatory for all citizens -- with the only way to opt out of health insure being to pay a tax that will more than likely be more expensive than the cost of paying for healthcare. This aspect of health reform alone makes this measure worth endorsing and will greatly benefit community health awareness, since mandatory health care coverage will enable people to get check-ups, determine what is wrong with them and ideally counteract any potential negatives. Moreover, this aspect of President Obama's health care reform would enable nursing students and health care professionals in general to work with a greater percentage of the population, allowing them to directly affect the health of that population as such.

Another key facet of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is that it has enacted legislature that makes it easier for people with previously existent health care conditions to both get health coverage as well as to get the treatments they need. Again, the result of this aspect of the health care reform measure is that it should make it possible to increase the general wellness of the American people. Also, health care insurance is projected to become more affordable due to various changes related to Obama's health care reform. Forms of preventative treatments, for example, will not require copayments. Doing so will allow more people who are not financially able to afford health care visits to access nurses and doctors at those facilities and get the treatments they require.

One of the most egregious health care epidemics to sweep through the modern world in the past couple of years is the infamous H1N1 swine flu. It took up a place of prominence in the health care industry in 2009, when it was initially discovered as a new, more malignant strain of influenza. Research linked this particular form of influenza to the type of this virus that is related to pigs -- some of the earliest reports of swine flu came from people who were either near pigs or had direct exposure to pigs. Still, it was quickly ascertained that the most popular way that this condition spread was actually from inter-human contact. This particular virus infects the cells related to a person's lungs, nose and throat areas, and is transmitted via contact from a contaminated surface to a person's hands, eyes, mouth or nose.