Community Health Projects

Intro Page

Assessing the Community

NURS 492: Community Health Nursing

Purpose of Assignment

The purpose of this assignment is to involve students in the comprehensive community needs assessment. Students will develop/utilize tools to identify perceived factors (both negative and positive) that impinge on the population’s health. This information will then be used to develop and implement strategies for health promotion. Topics have been identified from Healthy People 2020 Objectives. Presentations should be developed around one objective from the Healthy People 2020 focus areas.

Student Approach to Assignment

This project is highly personalized to my own passions. I chose a community that is close to my church, as I have personal investments and opportunities to serve and assist this community. It shows my efforts to engage my community members and develop a plan of care for them based on the research I conducted both online and through personal interviews with the clients and volunteer coordinators on site.

Reason for Inclusion of this Assignment in the Portfolio

I include this project because it demonstrates my desire to serve the community through my nursing skills, which is a new passion of mine through the course of my education. It is an example of growth in my nursing life, as it is my first step towards my future professional goal of community health nursing.

Domain 7: Systems-Based Practice

(4) Recognize the impact of health disparities and social determinants of health on care outcomes.

This element is met through my presentation of research articles which link poverty to poor health outcomes. The evidence shows a positive relationship between those who have housing instability and many health issues, such as cardiometabolic disease, mental illness, chronic disease, lower life expectancy, and substance abuse. This point demonstrates how a social determinant of health like poverty effects care outcomes in many aspects of a person’s life.

Domain 3: Population Health

& Domain 6: Quality and Safety

(20) Initiates community partnerships to establish health promotion goals and implements strategies to meet those goals.

I address this outcome by introducing my clinical site for this project, a local food pantry called Jefferson County Community Ministries (JCCM), where I began collaborating with them to determine the needs of the population that they serve and develop a plan to improve the community’s health. I describe their mission to provide support to the community, and in further slides discuss several programs in place within the city that JCCM collaborates with, like case managers on-site and SNAP. Several goals for health promotion are listed in the slide discussing the role of the nurse, including education and advocacy, screening, and providing resources. I verbalize several strategies to meet these goals, such as educating our clients on affordable healthy food choices using SNAP as well as lifestyle changes, screening new clients for the risk of poverty or other health problems associated with poverty, and providing struggling clients with resources to assist with care via case management involvement.

Domain 3: Population Health

(21) Assess the priorities of the community and/or the affected clinical population.

This assignment included a section where I assess the community through a windshield survey. The results of my survey are displayed and then verbally discussed in the presentation. I found an average neighborhood within the heart of the city and considered what physical conditions the neighborhood shows that may indicate the status of the population’s health, and saw many indicators of poverty there. Additionally, in my conversations with JCCM’s clients as well as volunteers, financial problems are the most common reason people seek help at this site. Based on the evidence presented in further slides that link poverty to poor health outcomes, the rest of my project is focused on the Healthy People Objective to “reduce the proportion of people living in poverty”.

Download a Word document of my Intro Page here:

View my presentation on Assessing the Community here:

Intro Page

Social Media Campaign Evaluation

NURS 492: Community Health Nursing

Purpose of Assignment

The purpose of this assignment is to discuss the creation, implementation, and evaluation of a public health messaging campaign.

Student Approach to Assignment

This evaluation was my personal take on the social media campaign I completed in this course. I personally was involved in the project by spending clinical hours within a food pantry, where I focused my patient population on. I learned how to properly analyze my own work, and determine my project’s success by utilizing outcome measurements from a change theory called the health belief model.

Reason for Inclusion of this Assignment in the Portfolio

I incorporate this into my portfolio as it shows my growth in evaluation of my own work. It represents my growth in community health nursing as well as educating a large audience through social media, as I reflect on my experience and the response to the campaign.

Domain 2: Person-Centered Care &

Domain 3: Population Health

(12) Establishes and/or utilizes outcome measures to evaluate the effectiveness of care.

In this assignment, I write about my plan to create a health campaign for the purposes of educating the community on the food pantry recipients’ nutritional needs. The outcome measures I utilize were in the form of health belief model, using the model’s constructs as my outcome measures. For example, the first construct of “perceived susceptibility” is used as a goal to educate my audience on the likelihood and prevalence of food insecurity, which the theory emphasizes is a barrier to changed behavior. I discuss in depth how each construct from the theory was utilized as an outcome measurement, and then discuss my evaluation of the campaign’s success based on these measures.

Domain 2: Person-Centered Care &

Domain 3: Population Health

(13) Evaluates nursing care outcomes through the acquisition of data and the questioning of inconsistencies.

This paper reflected on the experience of planning, implementing, and evaluating a health campaign within my community. I discussed the process of collecting data by interviewing other volunteers and clients that came to the food pantry, where I found the information on what to base my community health project on. I question inconsistencies by comparing this information with data from a research article on the impact of food pantry donations. By contrasting this article with my interviews, I was able to narrow down my topic to discuss the nutrient deficiencies in food pantry recipients and focused my implementation project on this topic.

Domain 8: Informatics and Healthcare Technologies

(40) Use evidence-based patient teaching materials, considering health literacy, vision, hearing, and cultural sensitivity.

I meet this outcome from this paper during my discussion of the health belief model to influence a change in behavior. Though my audience for this teaching is the general community, not necessarily a single patient, I utilize a variety of constructs from this health belief model to disseminate this education, such as knowledge of their perceived susceptibility to the health issue, perceived benefits, and perceived barriers to the change. The methods I use in my social media campaign are then centered around these individualized constructs that define my audience. For example, I educate them on the actual statistical prevalence of food insecurity in the region, to combat their resistance to believing their perceived susceptibility. My teaching materials are described as a video summary posted on Facebook of my findings regarding the issue, and are tailored to my known audience, which are likely other church-goers living within the area, by maintaining easy to read, quick facts, with helpful illustrations to support my points.

Download the Word document of my Intro Page here.

Download my Social Media Campaign Evaluation paper here.