PURPOSE
The purpose of this paper is to identify and assess a vulnerable population in your community. You will also describe one community health problem that impacts this vulnerable group. This problem must be one that a community health nurse could positively impact.
COURSE OUTCOMES
This assignment enables the student to meet the following course outcomes:
2. Assess the health needs of individuals, families, aggregates, and communities using demographic and epidemiological data to identify population health risks. (PO 4)
6. Utilize a systems-based and collaborative approach to address factors that influence the health of a community and population health problems. (PO 2)
Based on your community assessment, including your windshield survey and the assessment information from your discussions, identify one aggregate or vulnerable population in your community that faces a community health problem. See units five (5) and six (6) in your Nies and McEwen text for examples of vulnerable populations and aggregates. Your community must be the area where you live or work.
A. Introduction (one paragraph): The introduction should be interesting and capture the reader’s attention.
• Provide a brief description of your community including the city name and state and key features.
• Briefly introduce one vulnerable population that you identified in your assessment.
• Discuss the purpose of your paper. The purpose statement of the paper should relate to assessing this vulnerable population in your community.
B. Vulnerable Population Overview (one to two paragraphs):
• Describe one vulnerable group in your community in greater detail.
• Include your observations about this group from the windshield survey.
• Discuss events or trends that have affected this vulnerable group such as economic conditions, trends in health related behaviors or disease rates, etc.
C. Strengths, Risk Factors, and/or Barriers (two to three paragraphs):
• Discuss the strengths, risk factors, and/or barriers that impact this vulnerable population’s health.
• Include support from at least one scholarly peer-reviewed journal article in this discussion. Go to the Chamberlain library at http:/library.chamberlain.edu. Search peer reviewed journals to find a scholarly article that discuss the strengths, risk factors, and/or barriers faced by this vulnerable group. Summarize what you learned from this article and cite the source in the text and reference page (Author, year). For this section, you must choose at least one scholarly article from a peer-reviewed journal. The article must be less than 10 years old (less than 5 years is best). You may include and cite your textbook or other scholarly sources as well, but they do not count as the scholarly journal article.
• Please do not include more than two short quotations, at the most. You will need to summarize and analyze the information from the article in your own words.
D. Community Resources (one to two paragraphs): Search your local public health department website, the internet, the local newspaper and/or telephone book for health resources available in your community for this vulnerable group.
• Briefly describe the resources in your community that are available for this group.
• Are these resources adequate? Discuss gaps in services that you identified.
E. Community Health Problem Diagnosis (one to two paragraphs):
• Based on your assessment and the Healthy People 2020 objectives, identify and discuss one priority community health problem that a community health nurse could positively impact. Examples include an increase in teen pregnancies, prevalence of cancer, high incidence of tobacco use, above average infant mortality etc. The problem must relate to the vulnerable population you identified.
• Go to the Healthy People topic areas . Find a topic area that relates to your vulnerable population. Click on the topic area and then click on the green “Objectives” tab. Find and state the Healthy People 2020 specific numbered objective (not just a goal) that describes your problem (ex. for teen pregnancy, the topic area Family Planning is relevant, click the green objectives tab and you might choose FP-8.1 “Reduce pregnancies among adolescent females aged 15 to 17 years” (US Department of Health and Human Services: Healthy People 2020, 2016, Objectives: Family Planning, para 8).
F. Summary (one paragraph):
• Summarize important points from the body of your paper including the vulnerable group you identified and key factors that you discussed above that affect the health of this group.
• Include a statement about the priority problem you identified.
• End with a concluding statement.
G. Reference Page: The Reference Page should start on a new page (insert a page break). All references should be cited within the body of the paper as (Author, year) and the full reference should be included in APA format on the reference page. A url link alone is not an adequate reference. See the APA Guidelines in Doc Sharing for examples of properly formatted references.