The nurse is experiencing a lot of challenges relating to the health and safety needs of the community. One of the challenges is that clinical services offered at community health are inadequate and inaccessible. For example, working parents cannot access clinics for their children because of inconvenient opening hours. Drug abuse is also a problem that the nurse might identify as a need. Most of the teenagers in the community are involved in drug abuse, destroying their physical, social, and mental health (Balamurugan, 2018). Thus, drug abuse and inadequate healthcare services are some of the challenges the nurse might identify.
Low socioeconomic status and inadequate educational facilities are other challenges that the nurse might identify as a need. In the case study, it is stated that the socioeconomic level of the areas is low. This means that most households have little income to afford basic needs such as food, shelter, clothing, health, and many more (Coupe et al., 2018). It explains why most of the households are covered by Medicaid and Medicare. Drawing from the case scenario, the community does not have enough educational facilities for learning. It has one high school, one middle school, and one elementary school. Therefore, the nurse is likely to identify low income and inadequate learning facilities as a need in the community.
Health Policy Relevance
Yes, the problems identified above have a health policy relevance. The problems can be addressed through a health policy initiative. The first problem that the nurse is facing is the excessive use of drugs by teenagers. To address this menace, an anti-drug abuse campaign policy can be developed by the clinic. The second problem is the lack of learning facilities in the neighborhood and can be addressed through a policy. The clinic can create a policy to enable them to focus on social justice and advocate for the rights of the people (Asakura & Maurer, 2018). The other problem is inadequate care offered to the community. The clinic can develop a policy to have flexible opening hours to enable working parents to access healthcare for their children to address this problem. Thus, these problems can be addressed by adopting relevant health policies.
Health Policy Development
The problem I have chosen for policy development is the lack of adequate learning facilities in the neighborhood. The area has one high school, one middle school, and one elementary school from the case study. The agenda of the policy is to increase the number of learning facilities in the area. With an adequate number of schools, the children will go to school and reduce illiteracy level. The stakeholders to help develop this policy are the clinic’s leadership, community leaders, social workers, politicians, and education leaders.
The nurse should use the following steps in the development of the policy. First, the nurse needs to inform the clinic’s leadership about the problem and focus on social justice (Lewinski & Simmons, 2018). Second, after obtaining approval from hospital leadership, the nurse should engage with the community leader, social workers, and educational leaders. Third, the nurse should inform the stakeholders on the importance of increasing the number of learning institutions. These steps help in the creation of an effective policy.
There is also a need to consider aspects for implementation and political issues. Some of the considerations for implementation are the availability of funds, human resources, and the number of children that the current institutions cannot support (Lewinski & Simmons, 2018). Political issues include lobbying to allocate funds for building the schools. Politicians play an important role in the allocation of funds for development in the community. The analysis for outcome involves checking the existence of additional schools built in the area.
References
Asakura, K., & Maurer, K. (2018). Attending to social justice in clinical social work: Supervision as a pedagogical space. Clinical Social Work Journal, 46(4), 289-297.
Balamurugan, J. (2018). Drug Abuse: Factors, Types and Prevention Measures. Journal of Advanced Research in Humanities and Social Science, 5(4), 14-20.
Coupe, N., Cotterill, S., & Peters, S. (2018). Tailoring lifestyle interventions to low socioeconomic populations: a qualitative study. BMC Public Health, 18(1), 1-15.
Lewinski, A. A., & Simmons, L. A. (2018). Nurse knowledge and engagement in health policymaking: Findings from a pilot study. The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 49(9), 407-415.