Write a 4-5 page population health improvement plan, based on your evaluation of the best available evidence from a minimum of 3-5 current scholarly or professional sources of demographic, environmental, and epidemiological data that focuses on your diagnosis of a widespread population health issue.
Part of effectively engaging in evidence-based practice is the ability to synthesize raw health data with research studies and other relevant information in the literature. This will enable you to develop sound interventions, initiatives, and outcomes to address health concerns that you find in data during the course of your practice.
In this assessment, you have an opportunity to evaluate community demographic, environmental, and epidemiological data to diagnose a widespread population health issue, which will be the focus of a health improvement plan that you develop.
Demonstration of Proficiency
By successfully completing this assessment, you will demonstrate your proficiency in the following course competencies and assessment criteria:
•Competency 2: Apply evidence-based practice to design interventions to improve population health. ◦Evaluate community demographic, epidemiological, and environmental data to diagnose widespread population health issues.
â—¦Develop an ethical health improvement plan to address a population health issue within a community.
•Competency 3: Evaluate outcomes of evidence-based interventions. ◦Propose criteria for evaluating population health improvement plan outcomes.
•Competency 4: Evaluate the value and relative weight of available evidence upon which to make a clinical decision. ◦Justify the value and relevance of evidence used as the basis of a population health improvement plan.
•Competency 5: Synthesize evidence-based practice and academic research to communicate effective solutions. ◦Develop a strategy for communicating with colleagues and members of the community in an ethical, culturally sensitive, and inclusive way.
â—¦Integrate relevant and credible sources of evidence to support assertions, correctly formatting citations and references using APA style.
Scenario
Your organization is undertaking a population health improvement initiative focused on one of the pervasive and chronic health concerns in the local community. Examples of health improvement initiatives include nationwide concerns, such as type 2 diabetes, HIV, obesity, insect bites, and Zika. However, your organization has asked you to determine which widespread health concern should be addressed in a population health improvement plan for your community and has entrusted you with gathering and evaluating the relevant data.
Your Role
You are a nurse in a community clinic or hospital and you have a good idea about the most common chronic health issues among its patients. You have been asked to prepare a presentation for the next staff meeting about the issue and the plan that you are proposing to help improve the community’s health.
Instructions
The requirements outlined below correspond to the grading criteria in the scoring guide, so be sure to address each point. In addition, you may want to review the performance-level descriptions for each criterion to see how your work will be assessed.
Part 1: Data Evaluation
Evaluate the outcomes of a population health improvement initiative from community demographic, epidemiological, and environmental data.
•Identify the relevant data.
•Identify the level of evidence, validity, and reliability for each source.
•Describe the major community health concerns suggested by the data.
•Explain how environmental factors affect the health of community residents.
Part 2: Health Improvement Plan
Develop a health improvement plan that ethically and effectively addresses the population health concern that you identified in your evaluation of the relevant data.
•Base your plan on the best available evidence from a minimum of 3-5 current scholarly or professional sources. ◦Apply correct APA formatting to all in-text citations and references.
â—¦Attach a reference list to your plan.
•Ensure that your plan meets the cultural and environmental needs of your community and will likely lead to some improvement in the community\’s health related to this concern. â—¦Consider the environmental realities and challenges existing in the community.
â—¦Address potential barriers or misunderstandings related to the various cultures prevalent in the community.
•Justify the value and relevance of the evidence you used as the basis of your plan. ◦Explain why the evidence is valuable and relevant to the community health concern you are addressing.
â—¦Explain why each piece of evidence is appropriate and informs the goal of improving the health of the community.
•Propose relevant and measurable criteria for evaluating the outcomes of your plan. ◦Explain why your proposed criteria are appropriate and useful measures of success.
•Explain how you will communicate with colleagues and members of the community, in an ethical, culturally sensitive, and inclusive way, with regard to the development and implementation of your plan. ◦Develop a clear communications strategy mindful of the cultural and ethical expectations of colleagues and community members regarding data privacy.
â—¦Ensure that your strategy enables you to make complex medical terms and concepts understandable to members of the community, regardless of language, disabilities, or level of education.
•The headings for your Evidence-Based Population Health Improvement Plan should be the following: ◦Data Evaluation.
◦Meeting Community Needs.
â—¦Evidence.
â—¦Measuring Outcomes.
◦Communication Plan.
Additional Requirements
•Length: Your recommendation will be 4-5 double-spaced pages, not including title and reference pages.
•Font: Times New Roman, 12 points.
•APA Format: Your title and reference pages need to conform to APA format and style guidelines. The body of your paper does not need to conform to APA guidelines. Do make sure that it is clear, persuasive, organized, and well written, without grammatical, punctuation, or spelling errors. You also must cite your sources according to APA guidelines.
•Scoring Guide: Please review this assessment’s scoring guide to ensure you understand how your faculty member will evaluate your work.
Evidence-Based Population Health Improvement Plan
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliations
Evidence-Based Population Health Improvement Plan
Community health nurses provide care to populations in the community. In this respect, they should be adequately informed about the health needs of their communities and be able to devise interventions to address them. Like other nurses, community health nurses must select public health improvement interventions that are supported by research evidence. Additionally, they must be in a position to evaluate the outcomes of evidence-based interventions they implement (Ross et al., 2018). The purpose of this assignment is to describe an evidence-based population health improvement plan for addressing obesity concerns in the community. The assignment will cover an evaluation of the relevant community demographic, epidemiological, and environmental data related to obesity. The paper will also discuss evidence-based health improvement interventions, how outcomes will be measured, and a plan for communicating the information with colleagues and members of the community.
Part 1: Data Evaluation
Community Demographics and Major Health Concerns
The hypothetical community that will be the focus of the paper is a medium-sized local setting. The number of people who reside in the community is about 400 individuals. The population is a mixture of men, women, and children from different races including whites, Latinos, and African Americans. The sources that are being reviewed to obtain data related to the community are relevant, valid, and reliable. From the epidemiological data, the major concern for the community is obesity. Incidence rates of obesity have been on the rise among members of the community. The problem occurs across individuals of different age groups but it is worse in children under five years and less severe among adults aged 18 years and above. The rise in the incidences of obesity is observed uniformly across the community with all geographical locations and races recording at least a case of obesity within a period of just a few months. When compared to 2017 statistics, five years ago, the incidences of obesity in the community have doubled by September 2022.
Effects of Environmental Factors
A number of environmental factors have been found to have an effect on the health of community residents. One of these factors is the type of foods available to the community for consumption. The community has increased access to high calories and high energy-dense foods such as carbohydrates. High-calorie and energy-dense foods have been associated with increased incidences of obesity among populations (Albuquerque et al., 2017). The other environmental factor is the lack of facilities where people can freely engage in physical exercise. The lack of parks and open fields where members of the community can actively participate in physical activities such as swimming, walking, and playing football to burn excess body energy fats. The few facilities that are available are underutilized because only a small number of community members are using them. The environment in which a person lives at home can increase his or her chances of developing obesity. Essentially, quite a number of community residents have a tendency of spending much of their time watching television. This is happening among children and adults alike. Published evidence supports the association between high obesity incidence and the lack of physical exercise as well as prolonged television watching (Congdon, 2019). Public health improvement interventions should target environmental factors.
Part 2: Health Improvement Plan
Meeting Community Needs
A health improvement plan for the community should entail the implementation of interventions that are supported by research-based evidence. For example, the community health nurse should screen the social environment to identify the factors that might be contributing to high obesity incidences. Additionally, the nurse should work with the leaders of the community to set aside areas where community members can engage in physical activities such as swimming pools, parks, open fields, and sports grounds (Albuquerque et al., 2017). Furthermore, the nurse should oversee the introduction of a school feeding program where students can get a balanced diet thereby limiting the consumption of high-calorie foods (Nally et al., 2021). Other evidence-based public health interventions that the community health nurse should consider include educating parents to feed their children with low energy or low-calorie foods and educating the community about the risk factors of obesity and how to avoid them (Angawi & Gaissi, 2021).
The interventions described above will likely lead to some improvement in the community’s health in relation to the obesity concern. The reason is that they are promoting access to healthy foods, exercise, and education (Albuquerque et al., 2017; Nally et al., 2021). Again, members of the community can apply the knowledge acquired from the educational programs to avoid the risks of developing obesity (Angawi & Gaissi, 2021). The chosen interventions are aimed at improving the environmental realities and challenges that are existing in the community. A potential cultural barrier that might hinder the successful implementation of the chosen interventions concerns how to limit calorie intake among the whites. Most whites feed their children junk and high-calorie foods that increase obesity risk (Albuquerque et al., 2017). This barrier will be addressed by educating these families about the health benefits of avoiding such foods as it relates to obesity risk.
Evidence
The evidence that has been used to develop this public health improvement plan is relevant and valid. It is valuable and relevant as it will help to address the obesity concern that is currently witnessed in the community. For example, screening the social environment is appropriate because it will help the identification of the factors that might be contributing to high obesity incidences (Albuquerque et al., 2017). Besides, creating spaces for physical exercise will increase exercise access, introducing a school feeding program will increase access to healthy foods, and educating parents and the community will help them to understand the risk factors of obesity and how to avoid them (Angawi & Gaissi, 2021; Nally et al., 2021). Due to its relevance and appropriateness, the evidence should inform the goal of improving the health of the community in relation to obesity.
Measuring Outcomes
The best way to assess the effectiveness of the intervention is to set measurable criteria. The measurable criteria include; a rise in the number of community residents who participate in exercise activities within the next one month, a reduction in the number of hours per day spent watching television within a period of two weeks, and a reduction in obesity incidences by 25% in the next three months. These criteria are appropriate and useful measures of success because they will tell whether the proposed evidence-based public health improvement interventions have been implemented (Albuquerque et al., 2017; Congdon, 2019).
Communication Plan
I will use a poster presentation to communicate with colleagues and members of the community regarding the proposed interventions. I will ensure that the communication is done in an ethical, culturally sensitive, and inclusive way by using simple language that members of the community can understand and by avoiding language that might appear to be abusive and disrespectful to certain cultures (Albuquerque et al., 2017).
Conclusion
One of the ways through which community health nurses can contribute to improving the health of populations is by designing health improvement initiatives aimed at addressing chronic health concerns in the local community. In this paper, the author has described an evidence-based population health improvement plan for addressing obesity concerns in the community. Population health improvement interventions should always be informed by appropriate evidence-based research.
References
Albuquerque, D., Nóbrega, C., Manco, L. & Padez, C. (2017). The contribution of genetics and environment to obesity. British Medical Bulletin, 123(1), 159–173, https://doi.org/10.1093/bmb/ldx022
Angawi, K., & Gaissi, A. (2021). Systematic review of setting-based interventions for preventing childhood obesity. BioMed Research International, 2021, 4477534. https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/4477534
Congdon, P. (2019). Obesity and urban environments. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(3), 464. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16030464
Nally, S., Carlin, A., Blackburn, N. E., Baird, J. S., Salmon, J., Murphy, M. H., & Gallagher, A. M. (2021). The effectiveness of school-based interventions on obesity-related behaviours in primary school children: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. Children (Basel, Switzerland), 8(6), 489. https://doi.org/10.3390/children8060489
Ross, B. C., Amy, A. E., Jenine, H., Justin, B. M., & Rachel, G. T. (2018). Getting the word out: New approaches for disseminating public health science. Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, 24(2), 102-111 doi: 10.1097/PHH.0000000000000673.