Community Health Department Essay.
Prepare an essay with the intended audience to be a community health department.
The chosen disaster is a hurricane.
Discuss the role of the Community Health Nurse in each stage of disaster. You should include each stage of disaster: preparedness, response, recovery with specific activities and resources that the public health nurse would use in each stage.Community Health Department Essay.
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Identify other agencies that might be involved.
Include intro and conclusion.
Introduction
Nurses are an essentialpart of the disaster management process because they offer their professional services to those affected within a community. Nurses should engage in disaster management nursing courses, especially those who work in communities prone to natural disasters such as hurricanes. The main disaster management processes in which a nurse can participate in a hurricane event include preparedness, response, and recovery.Community Health Department Essay.
Nurse Role in Preparedness
The disaster management process’s preparedness stage focuses on understanding how disasters may impact a community and how the community should respond to the disaster. Therefore, the most critical actions in preparedness for a hurricane disaster would be education and outreach to the communities. Nurses play a pivotal role in the preparedness efforts’ outreach and education efforts (Hilton, 2019). For instance, nurses could enroll in programs that educate the community members on what to do in a hurricane. Some of the training would be first aid training for those saving the lives of those drowned, or how to access safer areas and identifying the safer areas. During the outreach programs, the nurses should impart their medical knowledge to the community members on first aid, dress in case of an evacuation, and the necessary tools and objects that the people should always have packed in their homes in the event of a disaster. For example, the nurse could recommend that every community member should have a back ready with essentials such as a small first aid kit, a change of warm clothes, torches in the event of a power outage, medicines such as painkillers and pain balms, and a phone and charger, among other items. Such outreach programs and training are essential roles that the nurses play during disaster preparedness.Community Health Department Essay.
The nurse should also develop knowledge of the vulnerable populations and the available resources to cover the population’s needs in the event of a hurricane. Some of the information that the nurses should collect in this stage includes the home addresses of the vulnerable population and the location of the available resources such as shelters, hospital capacity, and the medical resources available in a hurricane (Hilton, 2019).
Nurse Role in Disaster Response
The disaster response stage in the management process entails saving lives, evacuations, and humanitarian needs such as public health services, safety, shelter, food, and resource distribution. This stage of the process focuses on dealing with the immediate needs that arise after a disaster(Tumulty& Batty, 2015). For this stage, the nurse plays significant roles, such as providing public health services. Examples of such services include offering first aid, handling casualties by offering them care and comfort essential to their healing and offering emotional support to those affected by the disaster(Tumulty& Batty, 2015). In a hurricane scenario, some of the nurse’s activities include facilitating communication between the patients and their families and updating them on their health progress. The disaster response process relies heavily on communication; therefore, the nurses should ensure there is clear communication in the process. Another nursing role in the disaster response in a hurricane would be to participate in the evacuation process. The nurses collaborate with the paramedics in locating injured people. In the preparedness stage, the nurse identifies the vulnerable population to know where to first look for the injured if a hurricane hits an area.Community Health Department Essay.
Nurse Role in Disaster Recovery
The recovery process in disaster management entails the restoration of all the disaster’s impacton a community. This process aims to return operations to normalcy, which can be achieved in short-term and long-term phases. In this stage, the nurse’s pivotal role is to participate in the strategic planning and actions needed to address the more permanents impacts. Therefore, the nurse should engage in policymaking efforts related to ensuring that the community is adequately prepared to minimize the people’s health damage(Tumulty& Batty, 2015). For instance, the nurse could propose regular training of community members on first aid and conduct drills on survival actions during a hurricane. Such efforts are essential because, in the future, the damage to people’s health is minimized through preparedness. The nurses can also participate in the recovery stage by enhancing their professionalism by undertaking disaster nursing courses to equip them with additional skills in disaster management.Community Health Department Essay.
Conclusion
The nurse plays a significant role in disaster management processes. In the event of a hurricane, the nurse should participate in the disaster preparedness process by conducting drills, raising awareness on how to behave during a hurricane, and teaching the community members first aid skills. In the disaster response stage, the nurse should participate in evacuation processes and provide public health services that include care and comfort to those affected. In the recovery stage, the nurse should engage in policy formulation and engage in consistent community training to prepare for disasters such as hurricanes.Community Health Department Essay.