High Blood Pressure is a condition characterised by a prolonged increase in pressure in the arteries of the large circulatory circle. High blood pressure is very common, and significantly affects people’s quality of life. Creating a preliminary care coordination plan allows to mitigate factors conducive to high pressure development through establishing specific goals to address the issue and involving available community resources in tackling the problem.
The development of high blood pressure is associated with excess body weight, low physical activity or its absence, improper nutrition, alcohol abuse, smoking, and prolonged stress. Therefore, the specific goals that should be established to address the problem comprise educating people about healthy lifestyle and eating habits, involving them into regular physical activities, and diminishing stress levels among the population. The associated best practices for health improvement include educational programs about healthy lifestyle, group physical activities and reflective and cultural practices that are aimed at reduction of stress.
One of the progressive approaches to the prevention and treatment of hypertension is the organization of a system of teaching patients and their families at a school for patients. Patient education is an organizational form of preventive group counseling, a medical preventive service provided to patients with hypertension in primary health care. The basis for the development of national programs for the prevention of chronic diseases and hypertension, in particular, was the American educational program “National High Blood Pressure Education Program”, developed more than thirty years ago (Muntner et al., 2020). The participation of patients with hypertension in modern educational programs helps them to form an idea of the disease and the risk factors conducive to its development. The use of training programs has not only medical, but also socio-economic significance, contributes to better social adaptation of patients with chronic pathology, which leads to a reduction in direct and indirect treatment costs. In addition, the program helps to deal with emotional stress caused by a new awareness of the state of one’s own health and serves to forms an active life position of patients.
Apart from programs aimed to educate people about high blood pressure, there are group physical activities that help to alleviate this medical state. Thus, there are numerous national programs that support physical education. Usually, activities differ for diverse age group, but every individual can find sports for themselves. Since elder people are more prone to the development of high blood pressure, sports activities for this age group have received special attention across various communities. Some of these programs are state-financed while others are organized by local authorities. Charitable organizations with the help of grants from the state can also promote ideas of physical activity among the elderly. In California, this system allowed to equip sports grounds for pensioners. Thanks to this initiative, many groups of elderly people engaged in physical education with an instructor were formed.
The state helps to maintain physical activity in old age by organizing group hiking and cycling and establishing an environment friendly to the elderly — special walking paths and bike routes, and free medical consultations. Many older Americans were prompted to exercise by three-minute consultations with doctors. Patients were explained the advantages of physical activity and told how to increase it at home.
Reflective practices comprise community-sponsored programs, aimed at stress reduction, and social assistance programs that help people to cope with the difficulties they have and thus play an important role in reducing the levels of stress. Community or grant-sponsored programs often comprise a variety of trainings for people of different age groups or united by the types of problems they face. Apart from trainings, there are group therapy practices and social interventions aimed at improving people’s self-image and their quality of life. Yusufov et al. (2019) state that “cognitive–behavioral therapy, coping skills, and social support interventions are effective in reducing perceived stress, whereas relaxation training, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and psychoeducation are effective in reducing anxiety” (p. 132). Among social intervention practices, social assistance centers are becoming more and more popular. These are places where people from particular social groups – usually low-income families or those who have health problems – can make friends, get the support of a psychologist, and learn to cope with the difficulties they face. Thus, both – reflective practices and social therapy prove to be effective in helping people combat stress.
Community cultural incentives are also essential as a way to combat stress, prevent high blood pressure and promote healthy lifestyle. Recently, culture-based disease management strategies have been developed that aim to promote healthy eating habits and sports through cultural associations. Thus, Native Hawaiian “cultural-dance program [proved to be] efficacious in lowering blood pressure in hypertensive Native Hawaiians” (Kelly, 2020, para. 3). Moreover, Native Hawaiian culinary workshops organized to cook healthy native dishes allowed people to form dietary cooking habits.
Thus, preliminary care coordination plan aimed to reduce high blood pressure should comprise educational programs about the decease and ways to combat it, sports activities, and psychosocial and cultural practices conducive to stress reduction. The combinations of community incentives in all these fields would allow to manage high blood pressure effectively in all age groups. For those people who have not developed the decease yet, the proposed practices would be an efficacious measure to offset the start of the decease.
References
Kelly, K. G. (2020). Is culture-based disease management more effective than standard disease management in lowering blood pressure for Native Hawaiians?. Lynchburg Journal of Medical Science, 2(1), 20. Web.
Muntner, P., Hardy, S. T., Fine, L. J., Jaeger, B. C., Wozniak, G., Levitan, E. B., & Colantonio, L. D. (2020). Trends in blood pressure control among US adults with hypertension, 1999-2000 to 2017-2018. Jama, 324(12), 1190-1200. Web.
Yusufov, M., Nicoloro-SantaBarbara, J., Grey, N. E., Moyer, A., & Lobel, M. (2019). Meta-analytic evaluation of stress reduction interventions for undergraduate and graduate students. International Journal of Stress Management, 26(2), 132. Web.