Sentinel City Simulation: Community Health & Population-Focused Nursing - KLP 1

Sentinel City Simulation is a very recent development. It is an immersive computer environment that enables students to practice various tasks on community health nursing – previously done on the ground causing to students a lot of stress and practical constraints.

The latest Sentinel City program (3.0), developed by American Sentinel University, has been well-received and has won APEX Grand Award, WCET Outstanding Work Award, and stood finalist for 2 SIIA CODiE Awards.

That said, a lot of nursing schools are now adopting this program since it makes learning much easier for students (desktop-based) and carries handy tools for assessment.

What about the first Community Health Nursing Paper, KLP 1?

Well, it is tricky because not much help is available online and the new interface poses considerable challenge to students who have already completed a few credit hours based on the traditional method. Second, as the program is well-designed, it ensures the students are really taking something out of it.

Keeping this scenario in view, I have written this post hoping that, like my other posts, it will help you lessen some of the study stress.

So, first, what do the Instructions for this paper require of you to do: The Instructions are divided into three broad areas:

1. The three umbrella competencies: 7019.1.1 (Epidemiology); 7019.1.5 (Env. Health); and 7019.1.8 (Cultural Com).
2. Surveying 12 specific city locations and to send a completed PDF action report (ensuring that you’ve spent time on the program).
3. Using different data tools: 

• Demographic assessment (reading the data for age, median income, percentage of the people with/without insurance, etc.)
• Neighborhood/community safety inventory (what safety mechanisms are in place? Are there any environmental issues, such as air pollution?)
• Windshield survey (WS) (Moving around seeing the infrastructure, homeless people, population density, etc.)
• Population health scavenger hunt (Consulting with data from school, university, the ABC clinic, the grocery store, etc.)

With this homework done, most of the work is similar to the traditional Community health Task previously covered in this blog.

However, what is troubling in this paper is that nothing is written or given in an analytic fashion. The student must plough through the four districts of the Sentinel City and connect other community resources (the 12 locations) by making sense and synthesizing relevant data to find out:

1. What 3 major community health problems the Sentinel City faces
2. What community resources are available to address ONE of the three problems
3.  The primary health topic you’d like to work on in the future paper (of the 3)

I am going to try to help you in this domain and hope that you’d find interpreting the City data convenient for your paper.


Analyzing the four districts of the Sentinel City
Please keep in mind that this section is written in a way that covers all the four tools required to be used. It is because it accumulates findings from these tools: Windshield survey is done by every student already and by surveying the city locations, you're making use of other tools (the demographics, environment, and scavenger hunt, etc.).

So, let’s start our data analysis. Demographics about the four districts (Acer Tech Center, Casper Park, Industrial Heights, and Nightingale Square) tell quite a few (and obvious) things about the populations in these districts.

Acer Tech Center has a total of 168390, white-dominant (70.2%) population, moderately higher income, $166,300, with much larger population above 18 and below 65 years of age, and with just a marginal proportion of the population (1.5%) without insurance.

Casper Park presents a very different picture: population, 352643, 24% Hispanics or Latinos, 10.9% citizens are children, 33.8% under 18. What about the uninsured under 65: a huge 22.7%.

Synthesis of the data

Now, let’s synthesize data for these two districts. Let’s take help from literature. So, literature has well-documented that income level, ethnicity, (among many other variables) and community health are related. Higher income levels are associated with cleaner neighborhoods, betterinsurance coverage, fewer children per family, etc.

Along these line, we can see that most of the uninsured (if not all) are most probably also the ones without jobs, and so maybe do not have a home to live in. So, the neighborhood they live in has low quality of life, junk food (cheap), lack of health care access.

Literature also informs us that lack of access to health care, combined with these factors, in the US, is associated with oral health problems, cardiovascular diseases, mental health issues, diabetes, obesity, and so on.

This way you get a very good individual picture of each of the four districts, and your WS survey would speak about the cleanliness of the neighborhood, number of people/children outside, etc. This way, describe each districts individually.

With this exhaustive account, you can move on to analyze other locations. For example, let’s take the data from the Better Health Clinic. Rates for STDs, pregnancies, and abortions are much higher (compared to global data matrices), and the Clinic provides services in these areas. Then why is there little progress?

Because in the community people are not being educated about lifestyle, safety, etc.

Adding from other locations
Similarly, Joe’s Grocery is to be hailed (hail Caesar) for being reported for so many infections caused. Here we are so sure that the authorities are not working as they should (another aspect missing for our community nursing).

Lily’s Restaurant serves unhealthy food. It must be cheap, right? Who consumes cheap food in US? You’re right? Then there is a very high calorie consumption percentage that people are using at home. What about the parks? Crime rates are higher, and the public space is occupied by the homeless population.

So, let’s sum it up. Jobless people, uninsured, children, and adolescents consume cheap food, lack access to health care. They don’t have much

to recreate to cope with their everyday stressors. Poorer neighborhoods are also congested with pollution and noise.

This tells us that at least 2 Districts present a very alarming condition; taking help from literature, we’re sure that many health issues (here you can add references from Healthy People 2020) such as obesity, diabetes, mental health problems, STDs, oral health, women-child health, (Day Care Center data) must be haunting our Sentinel City.

I hope I have tried to help you in the right direction. Once you pick up in this way, I am sure you can get over the entire paper very well.

Should you need any further assistance, please do not hesitate to reach me. I won’t bite! Yikes! Email me at: meokhan2/at/gmail/dot/com