C229 - Community health and population-focused nursing field experience

This walk-through is intended to make your life easier by giving you first-hand advice on every section of this paper - my personal writing experience. I have had many requests to post it and have finally found some time now. Hope it helps!

To call my shots, I'll focus mostly on the paper. You do, however, want to review all the resources alongside.

First, the paper has two major/different parts: (A) Activity Log and (B) the actual field-experience paper.

Part A. Activity Log 

This is a straightforward activity and will consume your time filling in the fields in the table but does not require any specialized knowledge. You want to provide the details of all the persons you contacted during your fieldwork (usually, googling around town works well 😉). A total 90 hours' log is needed, and you've already completed 25 hours. So, now you need the activity for  65 hours of the fieldwork! There is a snapshot from an original paper I did for a client (specific areas blacked out - you know!) for you to see how it is done:

Example for Activity Log: C229 Part A

That's it! Pretty simple, isn't it? All the As will be done this way. You can be more creative if you like.


EDIT: Please note that in the wake of coronavirus outbreak, the activity log has changed a bit. It now mostly include online field activity, i.e., time spent on learing more about your topic, virtual interviews, webinars, etc. I think it should come pretty easy to you still.

Part B: Background and fieldwork

B. This section marks the start of C229: Social Media Campaign Paper. Let's cover all the bases.

Community Health Diagnostic statement: Suppose you've selected to work on obesity (among disadvantaged females in our town) as your topic. The diagnostic statement needs to make the diagnosis. For this you can refer to existing literature/information.

Example: According to Taxes Health Assessment Report (2016), obesity in disadvantaged female population in my city is on the rise due to lack of awareness, access, and unhealthy lifestyle. Thus, over the years, the number has risen to ......

B1. Health Inequity/Disparity
The instructions, accompanying the Rubric, clearly lay out that in this section you need to provide a link between the diagnosis (above) with ground realities. Put another way, you need to simply cite literature to substantiate your diagnosis, that is, disadvantaged female population in your city is gaining weight.

Some facts about obesity you want to consider doing this section: Though it affects all races and ethnic groups, more burden is on people with low socioeconomic profile because of lack of resources, etc.

B1A. Primary Community and Prevention Resources
This section is simple. There is a need to find out what resources are already available in your community. My experience doing this for different clients informs me that although resources in a city are available, potential clients (e.g. obese individuals, older adults, those doing drugs) lack information or access to these. Some towns in US are remote which is another reason. So, you can do the research to find out the available resources and highlight why your population is unable to access these resources (usually lack of access, information, and means).

B1b. Underlying Causes
This is also quite simple. I have already covered some underlying causes above. There may be more for you to find out.

B2. Evidence-Based Practice
Now, this is a bit tricky. In this section, you must cite a few recent resources that offer some detail about how authorities, hospitals, and town administration, etc., in your community, are working to ensure EBP is offered to obese individuals in your town and state. We all know that incorporation of EBP in the mainstream healthcare is being pushed, but the process is still slow. For obesity, you can look for programs that offer nutrition/calorie-based diet training, physical activity, and behavioral change for healthful living (these are some of the major EBP areas within obesity).

B2a. Identification of Data
As the prompt in the Instructions informs, it is a pretty simple portion. 3 smaller paragraphs or one with the 3 combined. Here you talk about available literature on the local, state, and national levels in regards to your findings about obesity among females of your chosen group.

National level data is readily available so is that of the states. Now, if your town is smaller, probably, there is not much empirical research. Thus, in the light of my personal experience, you can directly refer to your findings during the fieldwork for local data:

For instance, I talked to Martha, a 23-year-old woman, about her weight, and she knew little about such and such services which surprised me a bit. It also convinced me of the disconnect between the consumers and the services, etc.

Part C: Social Media Campaign

This is a newly introduced part to c229, probably a year or so old. WGU (and others that have this same practicum) rightly sensed the need to introduce it because of increasing use of social media in our daily lives. You want to relax as I will try to explain it in a way that you'll find easy to do for yourself.

C1. Social Media Campaign Objectives

This section asks you to develop your objectives (at least two) so that your entire campaign can be based on these. Definitely, no campaign can materialize without its objectives. I have done this paper on quite a few topics, so I am thinking I should share objectives for more topics here than for obesity alone (to make your life even easier 😀). I am giving you just the crux of this point, you can add other details such as age group, time, setting, etc. ALWAYS connect your objective to existing EBP literature.

So, for the chosen obese female population:

Objective 1: To create awareness about the risks of more weight....etc. and

Ob. 2. To involve them in physical activity (based on EBP).

Elderly Fall

Ob. 1: To assess nursing homes for falls risks and educate older adults....

Ob. 2: To offer training to the residents to prevent falls (based on EBP)

Vaping among youth

Ob 1: To understand the environmental factors for vaping...

Ob 2: To offer intervention to create awareness about its harms.

Youth well-being
Ob 1: To understand the environmental factors for vaping...
Ob 2: To offer intervention to create awareness about its harms.

C2. Social Marketing Interventions
Please pay attention. Here, you need to discuss 2 interventions (or more) closely based on your objectives in C1 above; it must be "population focused" and "logically explained" to "improve the health message" (Instructions, p. 1).

Let's pick objectives from tab 2 above (Elderly Fall).

To assess falls risk in the nursing homes, the social media campaign will offer free assessment visits by my team (or partners, etc.). To educate older adults, I will work in partnership with relevant stakeholders to develop educational material, hands-on activities, etc. and to offer training to both staff and the residents....

You do want to see that each intervention is tied to the corresponding objective above. Now, you will actually use the social media to engage your population to achieve these objectives.

C3: Social Media Platforms and C3a. Benefits of Social Media Platforms
It's pretty straightforward. You want to choose 3-4 platforms: (1) an official website, (2) Facebook, (3) Twitter, and (4) Instagram (for youth). For specific populations, there are region-based platforms as well that you can find out if interested. But I think these are enough.

Say a few lines about the benefits of each. An official website is necessary for legitimizing the whole campaign with a physical address and phone number, etc. Facebook keeps people engaged for hours; Twitter offers fast news dissemination, etc.

(Remember to cite references; there are plenty out there!).

C4: Benefits to Target Population

You're spending so much time and effort, so how about saying a few things about the benefits of this campaign that your target population may bag away with them? It's also a simple prompt. You'd want to share a few benefits such as they will be able to obtain firsthand expert advice via this campaign; the target population will be able to work as a big virtual team to life each other up; they will find profound motivation in this campaign, etc.

D. Best Practices for Social Media
You must review available literature to find out population-based best practices; however, it's no biggie, etc. Common best practices you want to talk about are: simple layout and font, language; consistency, and security of data/privacy.

Part E: Partners and Practicables 

E1. Stakeholders Roles and Responsibilities
Here, you need to identify a few community-based stakeholders and the responsibilities each may have in executing your SM campaign. Doing some googling will give you names of major NGOs, hospitals, nonprofits, and state agencies for your town. You can talk a bit about the support you will get from each.

For example: The Dept. of Parks in my town has promised to develop tailored recreational programs for obese females; XYZ NGO has considering offering fitness equipment, etc.

E2. Potential Partnerships
It is similar to the one above. You need to find a few relevant stakeholders and say a bit about the kind of partnerships you're working on to develop with them: (1) To offer discounted food from the supermarket (NGO); to involve the obese females in the state-sponsored training, etc.

E3. Implementation Timeline
How much time should all of this take? From planning and executing the entire campaign, probably, a community healthy nurse would take about three to four months, right? So, say that planning would take about 4 to 8 weeks, fund raising another 4-6, then developing the website and campaign another 4-8 weeks.

E4. How to Evaluate Effectiveness 
This takes you back to your objectives above. You now have to discuss how you are going to measure if your campaign is effective (i.e., it really made a difference).

For obese females, Objective One can be assessed by checking their knowledge through a questionnaire at the end, and Objective Two can be assessed by checking their weight (or BMI).

For older adults, Obj. One can be measured by the same questionnaire technique (what or if they have learned anything new), and Obj. Two can be measured by screening: (roadblocks removed, the adults keep their gait balance, etc.).

E5. Cost of Implementation
Let's break the costs first. How many team members you'd need? A website developer (freelance like me? 😛), a graphic designer, a data entry professional, a SM manager? So, each one will charge something on a monthly/quarterly basis to ensure your campaign is up-to-date and frictionless. So list each guy in the table, put down the potential expense + plus hosting and domain, etc. It will give you an estimated cost. That's it!

F. Reflection on SM Marketing and F1. Ref. on Future Nursing Practice
These are pretty straightforward prompts though a bit technical.

How your SM marketing campaign will benefit your population? In many, many ways, e.g., we all know that before SM, it was impossible to reach far-lying groups and connect them together (without moving them from their chair!): major benefit. Similarly, like-minded people in the past just couldn't find each other on this level. Online support group is a BIG boon of SM, etc. (Cite some literature!)

If you do a SM campaign just like this one, it will certainly give you IT-related expertise, community-based experience, and most of all, leadership skills in collaboration, teamwork, and consultation. Say these things in more fancy ways, and we're done! 😎

If you found this post worth your time, I'd be happy to have a should out from you, and remember, I am always there to assist you at: meokhan2/at/gmail[dot]com

Western Governors University - BS Nursing

Western Governors University's (WGU) BS Nursing program is a highly credible and well-recognized academic degree in the U.S. and outside it.

There are quite a few strengths of the program making it a highly credible pick by the certified nurses who want to move on to the next level: B.S. Nursing.

The standard completion time for this online course is 18 months in which the candidate has to cover quite a few time-bound tasks, projects, and activities that add up to their passing score. You can find all the details of this program here.

The purpose of this post is NOT to promote the WGU's BS Nursing program. No way! I write this post only to let you know that, EXCEPT FOR HARD/NATURAL SCIENCES TASKS, I can provide assistance in all the tasks for this program since this is my job to help out students in their time of difficulty while pursuing an academic goal in the middle of their professional and home-based responsibilities.

So, I would give you a brief overview about some of the major tasks required to complete in this program.

The degree is divided in quite a few sections/subdomains of health care and nursing, and each section covers subjects from basic calculus to literature, from evidence-based practice to community health nursing, etc. Major breakdown of the program falls into the following subdomains.

1. Professional development
2. Quality and safety
3. Evidence-based practice
4. Applied leadership
5. Community and population health

Under each of these subject areas, there are quite a few tasks and activities that involve fieldwork, research, collaboration, synthesis, and writing. The overall focus of the degree program, thus, is to develop in the nurse the professional skills and competencies that can help them play an active role at different levels in the health care sector.

If we look at the academic subdomain, Evidence-based practice, there are quite a few writing tasks that help the professional to nurture hardcore skills to play with evidence-based nursing. Evidence-based nursing has now become part of professional nursing, and so, the nurse has to consult available evidence with regards to a health care concern/issue needed for careful decision making.

WGU's EBP is particularly known for developing advanced-level skills for EBP in their students. The reason is that the subdomain enables the nurse to differentiate between different types of literature available in the current health care knowledgebase: 

• Primary research
• Secondary research
• Evidence guidelines
• Evidence summary
• Meta-analysis
• Synthesis of different types of evidence

and so on. Moreover, EBP also requires the nurse to carry out tasks that are field-based, i.e., the professional has to connect the literature search, review, and synthesis to the health care context they are either employed at or has knowledge of.

The end-result of covering the EBP is that the candidate gets away with a bundle of cutting-edge skills in EBP.

Community and Population Health Nursing is the most challenging yet exciting subdomain of BSN at WGU. Challenging because the professional has to carry out very rigorous activities by being part of a community (usually the ones they live in), and by applying the principles of community health nursing in that community to bring about a positive change.


C228 - Community Health Nursing – Task 1

For example, one of the tasks in this domain is Application of Community Health & Population-Focused Nursing, a lengthy write-up around 20 pages. Activities in the task involve applying quite a few tools to identify a community and understand the major health concerns the community faces. This is a field project. There are six mandatory tools needed of the researching nurse (You) to apply to his/her selected context and discuss the application in the main document. These are:

1. Population Economic Status Survey
2. Neighborhood/Community Safety Inventory
3. Cultural Assessment Tool
4. Disaster Assessment and Planning Guide
5. Windshield Survey
6. Population Health Scavenger Hunt. 

There are quite a lot of documents, guides, and links that accompany this task. The details required to carry out each of these six tools are clearly given in these accompanying resources. However, putting them all together in this task requires advance writing and synthesis skills. To make things easy for you, I discuss each of these six tools below giving you the insider's view, i.e., the approach by which you can have your task passed.

1. Population Economic Status Survey
PESS tool is actually a comprehensive approach taken by the nurse while working in the community to objectively understand the major health concerns faced by the community. The rationale for this tool, provided by the WGU, is that it helps the nurse to understand a health concern and argue her position in order to address the issue in favor of her community.

To cut short, the nurse has to dig deeper into major databases at the state and federal levels, i.e., American Fact Finer, City-Data.Com, Census.Gov, Healthy People 2020, etc. Alongside, she has to visit the local community centers such as the City Council, Health Department, non-profit organizations, and so on.

At the end of this exercise of information gathering, the nurse is able to understand the economic drivers at play in regards to the community's overall health status (the poor vs. the rich).

2. Neighborhood/Community Safety Inventory
NCSI is another tool to be applied in the community. It helps the nurse to understand the systemic level factors when it comes to her community's health status. This tool is to be filled up by observing and collecting data from community resources such as fire, police, emergency departments, disaster management to clearly understand the safety-related dynamics and to develop her inventory. Thus, you will have to visit the relevant departments to carry out this task which should involve formal/informal interviews and focus groups with the relevant staff; in addition, searching relevant databases over the Internet is part of the game here.

3. Cultural Assessment Tool
CAT clearly points us to the direction of understanding the racial/ethnic, gender, age-wise makeup of the community to help the nurse to better understand the dynamics of the present health concerns as spread over these domains. Understanding the role of culture is fundamental in community health nursing because it is well established in literature that different ethnic/cultural groups view epidemiology and treatment of a disease differently. For instance, a Hmong community member might possibly explain her epilepsy as a spirit taking her over.

This tool also requires you to search for data. However, it has a subjective element that requires you to meet different people and talk to them, interview them, and understand their viewpoint in relation to a health concern and its treatment. These two areas of investigation combine together to add another dimension to your community health nursing fieldwork.

4. Disaster Assessment and Planning Guide
DA&PG, as the title suggests, is about understanding the many resources your community utilizes to combat a disaster, natural or otherwise. This takes you to survey the community's geography to find out its industry, terrain, etc. and to plan for a possible route to prevent a disaster from hitting the community. DA&PG also asks you to take note of such factors as weather patterns, cultural outlook, contagious diseases, the spread of a disease, etc. It also puts you to trace the local government's position on these variables. As soon as you start to cover the areas given in the tool, the picture of disaster assessment and any loopholes start to emerge for you to argue in favor of your community's health.

5. Windshield Survey
WS tool should have come in the beginning of this list because it is used (and expected by WGU to be used) in the beginning of your community health fieldwork. As the name suggests, this tool is to get the feel of the community through the bird's eye view. WGU's guide to WS states, "While driving through your community, stop for coffee or have lunch in a neighborhood".

Hence, your focus is to bear a holistic understanding of your community's overall feel and look that includes its housing, commercial buildings, open spaces, etc.

6. Population Health Scavenger Hunt. 
PHSH tool follows the footprints of the famous scavenger hunt game. However, in this task, it requires the nurse to choose six facilities from the long list given in the supplementary resource. So, logically, what you're doing here is a scavenger hunt for the community's health by going to these facilities and collecting information. But the approach is rigorous and systematic.

For example, you chose American Red Cross. Now, the hunt requires you to answer the 13 questions given in the same guide from "What is the organization's target population?" down to "What specific services does the organization provide?". At the end, thus, your knowledge of the community is immaculate and you become an expert nurse on that community! Wow, hats off to the WGU's curriculum planners, honestly!

This should be very clear from the tools mentioned that the task is highly beneficial for nurturing community health nursing skills and competencies.

The task discussed above is followed by Community Health & Population-Focused Nursing Practicum. This task is also quite long, around 25 pages, and requires applying the knowledge of the community's health profile (as obtained in the previous task) to address ONE specific health concern (e.g. obesity, cancer, influenza, etc.). For this, the candidate, once again, jumps on to the field and works with a number of community-based stakeholders to come up with a viable health care plan to address that health concern by taking into account the epidemiology and the prevention factors of the health concern.

The fieldwork requires a lot of activities from collecting reliable statistics to critiquing available resources and any loopholes. With these areas covered, the nurse then DEVELOPS effective and EFFICACIOUS interventions. The required number is two.

These interventions are well-planned. You will have to demonstrate every aspect of these interventions, i.e. how you would carry out these interventions, their estimated impact factor, and the objective evaluations of the outcome.

So this practicum is really killing in terms of the skills, deeper level understanding of community health nursing, and the relevant competencies you gain while doing it.

With this brief overview of the WGU's BSN, I would suggest that you should go ahead and get your hands dirty with the explosive knowledge and skills that the program has to offer. However, if you need any assistance anywhere in the program, coming to me will not be a bad idea.

Good luck! My email: meokhan2/at/gmail/dot/com