Screening interventions used by nurses often help improve patients’ quality of life. One of such assessment tools is Gordon’s Functional Health Patterns. It allows evaluating an individual in eleven areas: cognitive-perceptual state, health perception, elimination, nutrition, activity, sleep, role-relation, self-perception, values, sexuality-reproductive pattern, and stress tolerance (Türen & Enc, 2020). Patients are asked an organized set of questions about these aspects to obtain a comprehensive overview of their experiences during the hospitalization. Other screening programs were developed to focus on more specific problems like colon cancer history and alcohol abuse. A screening test that I sometimes conduct in pediatric patients is developmental screening to assess children’s physical, emotional, cognitive, and social development. Furthermore, I regularly participate in health interventions to reveal depression in patients with chronic conditions. It is essential to recognize mental health problems to suggest a therapist’s help.
Family and social support play a critical in the disease and recovery of patients. Such family characteristics as unhealthy lifestyle, low income, and poor communication were found to contribute to dysfunctional health patterns among adults grown in such communities (Daines et al., 2021). Indeed, unbalanced nutrition frequently leads to similar food choices in adulthood, leading to various chronic diseases in the long term. However, people can overcome this problem by receiving proper education about the importance of a healthy diet. Moreover, child abuse and neglect were associated with mental health problems such as depression and anxiety later in life because of lower resilience to external stressors (Daines et al., 2021). It appears that the most significant family factors that predicted abnormal health patterns are lack of emotional support and abuse that result in the development of different psychological issues.
References
Daines, C. L., Hansen, D., Novilla, M. L. B., & Crandall, A. (2021). Effects of positive and negative childhood experiences on adult family health.BMC Public Health, 21(1), 1-8. Web.
Türen, S., & Enc, N. (2020). A comparison of Gordon’s functional health patterns model and standard nursing care in symptomatic heart failure patients: A randomized controlled trial.Applied Nursing Research, 53, 1-7. Web.