Shri Durga Temple Health Education

Health Education: Shri Durga Temple
Problem
Type 2 diabetes is on the increase across the United States, but it has become a particularly difficult and intractable problem in Asian and East Asian communities. These populations tend to manifest type 2 diabetes at lower BMIs than the general population. According to Monhan (2004), “Indians have a greater degree of insulin resistance and a stronger genetic predisposition to diabetes. (par.1). This fact can lead to insufficient concern about BMI, particularly if residents compare themselves to non-East Asian neighbors.
Solution
Vigilance over one’s own health and over the health of individuals in one’s immediate ethnic community has an important preventative function and can reduce the need for more costly and intrusive secondary and tertiary care. Of course, regular primary care from a physician is optimal as a preventative measure for a variety of ailments, but maintaining a healthy weight ultimately requires self-monitoring
Opportunity
With this in mind, I seized the opportunity to be a health educator at the Shri Durga Temple Bakersfield in October of this year. My appearance was part of a day-long workshop designed to engage in population-specific health outreach to the Hindu and Sikh communities served by the Temple and who live in the immediate area. As well as lectures, the event offered health screening of cholesterol levels, blood sugar levels, blood pressure levels, BMI, and waist measurements to provide a general assessment of participants’ health. Of course, this was not designed as a replacement for physician care but rather to act as motivation to participants to seek out additional primary care or simply to make healthier choices. The event also had a blood donation center. The focus was on health improvement overall, but with a specific focus on type 2 diabetes and reducing factors that increase the likelihood an individual will develop the disease, such as a high BMI and a larger weight circumference than is optimal.
The event provided the opportunity to offer a wakeup call to members of the community about their health. Sometimes, seeing the numbers communicate to a patient that they need to prioritize their health to a greater degree in the way comments from friends and family, however well-meaning, cannot. Particularly in this community, outreach is necessary to communicate that what may be a normal BMI for their population is not necessarily the norm for the general population. Also, standards of weight may differ from what is optimally healthy, particularly for first and even second-generation residents who have experienced poverty and who may regard being overweight with less alarm than someone who has lived longer in the United States with Western norms of physical attractiveness as a part of their consciousness.
Competencies Addressed
Nursing competencies require that nurses offer “comprehensive care that meets patients’ complex and diverse needs” (Fukada, 2018). In this exercise, the patients’ diversity was acknowledged in the recognition of elevated risk of diabetes for specific patient groups. The complexity of their needs was attended to in the comprehensive nature of the screening, given that patients were tested for a variety of health measures. Patients with high BMI may not manifest type 2 diabetes initially, but cholesterol and blood pressure screening was also offered, which can also accompany high BMIs with or without diabetes being present.



References
Fukada, M. (2018). Nursing competency: Definition, structure and development. Yonago acta
medica, 61(1), 1-7.Retrieved from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5871720/pdf/yam-61-001.pdf
Monhan, V. (2004). Why are Indians more prone to diabetes? Journal of the Association of
Physicians of India, 52:468-74. Retrieved from:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15645957