To Class and Professor,

As nurses we are continuously educating ourselves about ways to improve patient care and health practices. Nurses play a vital role in promoting a healthy lifestyle and preventing illnesses from occurring in our patients. I feel that there are many public health concerns that are impacting my community and the U.S. Health concerns affecting my area I live are increase in prescription medication costs, drug and alcohol addiction, obesity, STD’s and poor environmental factors.

Factors that affect public health globally are related to increase in costs of health care without having improvement in health outcomes (Frieden, 2015). Health care providers are focused on treating diseases and experts are finding that the greatest improvement in public health is to focus on preventative measures (Frieden, 2015).

This class has educated me a lot of the health factors affecting my community. I think it is important to educate our patients too. I really liked the CDC Wonder website as well as the Environmental websites we used in class. I think making patients more aware of ways to prevent disease or giving them education to use on their own about a disease they may have may be efficient in improving health care outcomes.

Thank you, Shannon

References

Nies, M. A. & McEwen, M. (2019). Community/Public Health Nursing: Promoting the Health of Populations. St. Louis, Missouri: Elsevier.

Frieden, Thomas R., (2015). The Future of Public Health. Massachusetts Medical Society.