Reducing HIV Risk Factors Among Key Populations: Health Education Strategies for Community Nurses

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Introduction
Community-based healthcare services are provided in a wide variety of settings such as
community health centres, workplaces, child health centres, schools and family. These health
care services are involved with health promotion, well-being maintenance, health education,
continuity and coordination of health care within the community. Community nurses are among
the community health service providers, among other roles as determined by the needs of the
communities in which they work. A community nurse may also be employed to work as an
occupational health nurse; school nurse; or women’s health nurse (Funnell, Koutoukidis &
Lawrence, 2009).
As part of their service to the community, community nurses can help reduce risk factors for key
populations by using health education to promote health literacy. This paper aims at providing
the necessary information that could assist community nurses in achieving this task. It highlights
the key populations and their reasons for being considered as key to HIV infection in relation to
other community members, identifying the risk issues for the key populations, determining the
health education strategies that the nurses could use, explaining how these strategies would be
expected to promote health literacy for the key populations, and how these interventions would
be expected to reduce risks for this population.
Health education is a means to strategically promote healthy and safe behaviours among the
different groups in the population, the youth and children. It further aims to engage the education
sector in advocating for change of the educational, economic, political and social conditions
affecting health and wellbeing, (“Health education, as defined in World Health Organization
technical report, is concerned with changes in knowledge, feelings and behavior of people,”
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(S.r.tiwari, 2014, pg 3). It is a process that helps people to identify their health needs and activate
them for suitable behaviour. Health education is important as it helps to identify health problems
and patterns within a given population and find the necessary solutions to these concerns. Its
importance impacts on the whole community in such areas as creating awareness and prevention
of chronic diseases; infant and maternal health; substance use and abuse, prevention of violence
and injury; and obesity prevention.
Health literacy is used to describe the impacts of systems of health education, health care and
mass communication. Health literacy is used to refer to the levels at which people have the
ability to obtain, processing and understanding basic information and services of the health
system and make appropriate health decisions.
“ The World Health Organization (WHO) expands the definition of health literacy to
include personal action or use of information and states that health literacy represents the
cognitive and social skills that determine the motivation and ability of individuals to gain
access to, understand and use information in ways that promote and maintain good
health”, (Parnell, 2014, pg. 7).
According to (Kopera-Frye, 2017), health literacy is important because it allows the public and
all health personnel to find, understand, evaluate, communicate and use information. It also
improves the ability of people to act on information for healthier living. Furthermore, it equips
individuals with writing, speaking, listening, numeracy communication, interaction and critical
analysis skills.
The key populations for this paper, as provided in the instructional part, are men who have sex
with fellow men, people who inject drugs, people in prisons and other closed settings, sex
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