Mental Health and Children

¶ … Public Health Concepts for the Uninsured Pediatrics is an area of study for Doctors of Nursing Practice that provides wide-ranging and extensive healthcare from the time of birth through the period of adolescence by evaluation, diagnosis, management and evaluation of care. A key healthcare problem faced in pediatrics is mental health problems amongst children and adolescents. In recent periods, the public health significance of mental health conditions amongst children and adolescents has been of progressively increasing concern.

This prevalence of mental health issues in addition to their major influence on well-being and functioning indicates the necessity for early prevention (Ravens-Sieberer et al., 2008). Statistics indicate that just about one in five children across the world go through mental health issues. This encumbrance instigated by mental health problems may be progressively increasing. Several social changes have taken place in the 21st century that could have an adverse impact on mental health symptoms in prevailing generations of young individuals and give rise to an obstinate increase in mental health problem.

Some of these aspects take into account changes in the family setting, parental mental health issues, the internet and social media, and also high rates of single parenting (Bor et al., 2014). Literature Review Costello et al. (2003) undertook a longitudinal community study that examined the prevalence and development of mental disorders from 9 to 16 years of age and assessed homotypic and heterotypic permanency.

A representative population sample of 1420 children between the ages of 9 to 13 years from the outset were examined every year for DSM-IV disorders up until the time they reach 16 years of age. Outcomes of the study indicated that in the course of the research study period, 36.7% of the participants, which consisted of 31% of girls and 42% of boys, had at least 1 mental disorder.

Despite the fact that there has never been a characteristic population survey of child mental disorders, numerous research studies have been undertaken and an agreement been attained that any given time 1 child in 5 children will have a mental disorder (Costello et al., 2003). Reiss (2013) further goes on to link mental health problems amongst children and adolescents to socioeconomic inequalities. The research study methodically assesses publications on the correlations between different commonly used indicators of socioeconomic status and mental health results for children and adolescents between the ages of 4 and 18 years.

Outcomes of the study indicated that children and adolescents that are socioeconomically disadvantaged had a two to three greater probability to develop mental health problems. Moreover, low socioeconomic status that prolonged over a lengthy time period was significantly correlated to higher rates of mental health problems. A decline in socioeconomic status was linked to a progressive rise in mental health issues.

The magnitude of this relationship fluctuated with age and with various signs of socioeconomic status, while on the other hand heterogeneous results were reported for gender and kinds of mental health issues (Reiss, 2013). Description of the Case and Situation The situation at hand encompasses the worrying aspect of the progressively increasing mental health issues amongst children and adolescents. According to Parens and Johnston (2008), 1 in 10 children and adolescents in America every year have major and substantial functional impairments owing to a mental health disorder.

These tendencies and developments have instigated worry and concern that mental health disorders are being excessively diagnosed and that psychotropic medications are being overworked in children. In particular, the behaviors ascertained as indicators of psychological health disorders are delineated to various magnitudes in all children. Moreover, recent studies indicate that most of the mental disorders begin in children and adolescents prior to them attaining the age of 14 years.

In these cases, the studies indicated that biological aspects, for instance, genetics and also chemistry within the brain, together with environmental factors, like style of parenting and stress altogether have a role to play in mood and behavior of such children and adolescents (Parens and Johnston, 2008). Bearing this in mind, the increasing concern is the lack of doctors that can offer proper treatment and healthcare to mental health patients in a timely and efficient manner.

Summary of the Case In summary, there has been increased concern with regard to mental health care. Statistics indicate that 20% of children and adolescents experience mental health problems. This is a progressively worrying issue being faced by DNPs in pediatrics. Moreover, this becomes a major problem for the reason that failure to obtain proper treatment implies that such medical conditions end up harming the welfare of individuals even to their adulthood.

In the present day, not only do these children and adolescents lack comprehensive insurance to cater for their medical treatments, they also face the issue of lack of sufficient healthcare. There is a lack of adequate professionals that can provide medical treatment to the more than 15 million young children and adolescents that necessitate medical treatment (Luthra, 2016). In accordance to Burns et al. (2004), presently more than 43 million adults in the United States suffer from some kind of mental health problem, and this figure is progressively increasing.

Averagely, approximately 9.8 million adults suffer from a severe mental health problem. The upside to the legislation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has made it possible to attain access to mental care. Nonetheless, several mental health patients lack proper treatment despite the fact that efficacious treatments are present. Proposed solutions to remedy gaps, inefficiencies, or other issues from a theoretical approach There are various proposed solutions to dealing with the mental health issues amongst children and adolescents from a theoretical approach.

In summary, every year, approximately one in five children suffers a mental illness. However, a deficiency in medical experts and inpatient facilities across the nations implies that several of these children and adolescents fail to obtain proper treatment, despite national endeavors to enhance mental health care. One of the proposed solutions to this gap is increasing the number of suitable outpatient treatments for mental health issues. In particular, statistics indicate that roughly 6% of all health care emergency department patients, regardless of age, had a mental condition.

Majority of these patients tend to be children and approximately 23% of mental health patients remained in emergency care for lengthier periods surpassing 6 hours. Therefore, one of the proposed solutions to this gap is having good outpatient treatment for mental health issues and also having a suitable place for such patients to continue treatment the minute they arrive at the ER (Luthra, 2016). A shortage of inpatient beds for mental patients across the country is also another issue as they have to wait for periods surpassing one week to obtained treatment.

Filling this gap takes into account not only increasing the number of inpatient bed but also the specialists. According to Luthra (2016), in the United States, there are only 8,300 experts for treating such mental health problems for an excess of 15 million young patients. According to Patel et al. (2010), the treatment gap for individuals with mental health illnesses surpasses 50% in all nations of the world, rising to significantly worrying rates of 90% in nations with very minimal resources. Their findings propose three fundamental strategies for reducing and remedying the treatment gap.

The first strategy encompasses increasing the numbers of psychiatrists and other mental health experts. In the contemporary, one of the shortcomings in tackling mental health problems is the lack of adequate numbers of specialists and experts capable of providing proper medical treatments to the progressively increasing number of children and adolescents necessitating medical care (Patel et al., 2010). Secondly, there is increasing the participation of a wide range of suitably trained non-expert providers. The third strategy takes into account the active participation of individuals that are affected by mental health problems.

This is in tandem with the objectives of Movement for Global Mental Health, which calls for a wide-based approach to taking into consideration mental health needs and decreasing the treatment plan. In addition, making individuals more aware of mental health issues makes it much easier to not only tackle this problem comprehensively but also prevent it from taking place in further periods (Patel et al., 2010). An additional solution to remedying this gap in treatment is undertaking both cognitive therapy and family therapy.

To begin with, cognitive behavioral therapy is considered to be the most commonly employed therapy in the treatment of mental health problems such as depression. This takes into account the identification of copying mechanisms for both children and parents. In particular, within the cognitive domain, parents and taught and shown how to fix their negative perspectives, thinking and way of parenting. This is largely for the reason that some mental health problems in children arise from parenting styles.

Secondly, several research studies have indicated the significance and efficaciousness of family intervention and family involvement within the treatment of mental health problems. Depressed children and adolescents whose households were signified by significant levels of parental censure or emotional over involvement showed significantly diminished rates of recovery. Moreover, a proposed solution takes into account psycho educational family programs. In particular, the sessions are taught by professionals in the field of mental health problems and this progressively increases awareness and knowledge of such issues.

Not only are parents taught to take care of themselves before giving birth to children, they are also taught how to ascertain the symptoms of mental health problems, how to approach such children and adolescents, stress reductions, how to assist them and also information regarding their medical problems (Sokolova, 2003).

Identification of a research instrument to evaluate the proposed solution along with a description of how the instrument could be evaluated Taking into consideration the aforementioned proposed solutions to remedying gaps in mental health problems amongst children and adolescents, there are research instruments that can be utilized to assess the extent of such solutions. A key research instrument is to undertake patient surveys.

Over the past two decades, patient surveys have gained progressively more significance as meaningful and vital sources of information for identifying gaps and developing an efficacious action plan for quality improvement in healthcare. Aside from being an established benchmark and measure for healthcare quality enhancement plans, patient surveys can further be methodically and comprehensively utilized for developing improvement initiatives.

Therefore, in this case, patient surveys can be undertaken to determine the extent to which children and adolescents that get to the emergency room obtain proper treatment for their mental health problems. This will not only be able to assess the effectiveness of the solutions and at the same time yield a better understanding of patient perspectives and standpoints (Al-Abri and Al-Balushi, 2014). Conclusion The emotional and mental health and welfare of children and adolescents is of great significance. The mental health needs that are not met in the.