Community Health Discussion: Family Assessment and Needs

This discussion post, based on a community assessment, examines the challenges nurses face when dealing with diverse families, especially those experiencing crises. The author highlights the increasing prevalence of single-parent households and the potential health vulnerabilities of children in such families. The post emphasizes the importance of nurses' cultural competency and the need for training to provide family-centered care in multicultural settings. The author also responds to two classmate posts, discussing access to care issues, the surprising lack of homeless people in the community, and the impact of remote hospital locations. The assignment fulfills the requirements of a discussion forum, including an initial post and two replies to classmates, focusing on the identification of needs within vulnerable populations based on community observations.

Running head: COMMUNITY HEALTH
Community
Name of the student:
Name of the University:
Author’s note

1COMMUNITY ASSESSMENT
Discussion post:
Based on the review of the community observations data, the most important data point
was the large diversity in families and challenges for nurse in dealing with families who were
experiencing crisis. This was an important data because it signifies lack of competency of nurses
in dealing with families with complex health needs. This is a deficit that should be paid attention
to because if family nurse do not have the capacity to understand cultural and developmental
issues of family, families with crisis may not get the right guidance to resolve their issues. In
multi-cultural societies, there is not only a high health care demand, but also challenges in
implementing services as per cultural needs (Murcia & Lopez, 2016). Hence, nurses must be
trained to deliver care to families coming from different cultures so that family centred care can
be provided. The most surprising finding was that single parenting has increased and this could
make children in such families to be more vulnerable to poor health compared to those who have
both parents (Scharte, Bolte & GME Study Group, 2013).
Reply to post 1:
I found my 1st classmate posts to be insightful as the classmate rightly identified the
deficits in relation to access to care in the community and the challenges for the homeless people
in the community. Policy makers and local government of the community can look to address
the issue of the remoteness of the hospitals from the main island.
Reply to post 2:
The classmate’s post is informative as the post gives an interesting insight into the health
disadvantage for people living in the community. It was surprising to see that the community had
access to liquor store and fast food store, but it did not had access to health care services.

2COMMUNITY ASSESSMENT
However, the finding related to non-existence of homeless people was a surprising element of
the post.

3COMMUNITY ASSESSMENT
Murcia, S. E., & Lopez, L. (2016). The experience of nurses in care for culturally diverse
families: A qualitative meta-synthesis. Revista latino-americana de enfermagem, 24, e2718.
https://doi.org/10.1590/1518-8345.1052.2718
Scharte, M., Bolte, G., & GME Study Group. (2013). Increased health risks of children with
single mothers: the impact of socio-economic and environmental factors. The European Journal
of Public Health, 23(3), 469-475.