Nursing and Primary Health Care

Running Head: NURSING AND PRIMARY HEALTH CARE
NURSING AND PRIMARY HEALTH CARE
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

NURSING AND PRIMARY HEALTH CARE1
Response to question 1
When a patient is discharged from hospital there are certain other requirements that
has to be addressed. These requirements are necessary for recovery of the patient and this can
happen at any place including community centre, clinics or at the home care (Alley et al.,
2016). This process becomes troublesome for some people as these services can cause
economic hardships, location and transportation problem. This situations are an important
reasons for the patients who are not able to receive this services. I personally had experience
such a similar situations when one of my friend was admitted to the hospital for surgery and
after the surgery was complete he was asked to join the community services for further
medical assistance. At first me and my friend found the idea of community services very
helpful as being a nursing student I had learnt about these kind of services. I told my friend
that these services will help him in his further treatment at a subsidized cost as these services
include the community help.
However, to our surprise the services turned out to be a nightmare for me, my friend
and his family. The community centre was very far from their house and thus, it created a
huge problem for the transport as they had to travel a long distance to get the services. These
services were also not up to the mark of the medical guidelines (McGrail et al., 2015). The
primary health centres in Australia were established to provide accessible and affordable
primary health care for the people. PHC’s are supposed to provide the people with services
such as immunization, child and maternal health services and basic cure services. These
services were not available at the community centre and thus, my friend had to struggle for
basic nursing care. The centre was asking for money for all these services. As my friend
could not afford such costly services he was unable to get the proper medication required for

NURSING AND PRIMARY HEALTH CARE2
the treatment. Thus, the poor access to the primary health care remains a greater challenge for
healthcare sector.
In comparison to the Australian PHC’s which had a range of health care services in
both the private and Government sectors (Health.gov.au, 2019). A lot of Australians receive
their primary health care through the general physicians, primary health care providers
include nurses and other allied health care professionals. This is in contrast to the health
programme in which my friend was admitted where he could not get help from a single
worker and the workers were also not very efficient in their work. The primary health centre
in Australia also provide target specific treatment and management to the patients. This was
also not available at my friend’s community centre as he was given very general medicines
that are given to every patient in order to reduce their pain. The workers did not even
diagnosed him properly and also not communicating the action plan for the treatment and
management of the patient.
Response to question 2
The healthcare facilities should be very culturally competent in order to provide
quality care to the patients. This will increase the positive patient outcome and also will help
the patient in understanding the process of diagnosis and treatment plan. Language is the
greatest barrier to the culturally competent healthcare (Mitrou et al., 2014). For example, in
Australia there are some of the best PHC services available, yet, it had the most diverse
population. This makes it difficult for the people who are new to the place or are not able to
speak English. Thus there are a number of services available in Australia that make people
aware of the PHC services. These services include the use of interpreters that interpret the
treatment plan, diagnosis, patient management system for the patient. The other services
include the printing of the PHC services in different languages at different platforms. This