Discussion question this week: The CDC and Healthy People 2020 continue to educate on the importance, the improved ease of access and insurance coverage for screenings and vaccinations. It is the responsibility of nurses to engage our ageing adults in self-advocating for services that benefit the individual and community health. How can you, as a registered nurse, impact older adults to encourage routine vaccination? What impact does this have on the community as a whole?
Please respond to two student’s post with a 200 words each.
Student #1StacyMany illnesses have been prevented due to the incorporation of routine vaccinations and health screenings. Health screenings are provided to patients and communities to detect factors of health that have potential to impact one’s life such as blood pressure screenings. Blood pressure screenings are important indicators of a patient’s health. Hypertension is a leading cause of cardiac decline of a patient or population. Routine screening of blood pressure can help the patient and nurse to determine if the patient is experiencing increased blood pressures. The nurse and patient can work together on ways to decrease the blood pressure through education for lifestyle modifications, monitoring blood pressures and reporting blood pressure readings to the provider for review and or interventions as needed.
Yearly influenza vaccines are provided to communities, states, and the world, to slow the spread of the flu virus that has the potential to do great harm on vulnerable populations. Vulnerable populations are those with little to no immune systems such as infants and children, those that have comorbidities or disparities due to little or no access to healthcare. The ageing population can be seen as a vulnerable population as it does include numerous elderly patients that may have a harder time fighting off viruses due to weaker immune systems and or comorbidities such as diabetes or cancers.
As the world has seen with the global pandemic of Covid-19, the virus rocked all avenues of life and healthcare. The development of guidelines for social distancing and the manufacturing of vaccines to combat the virus and slow the spread have had a big impact on the survival rates as well as health of the communities. The importance that vaccines play is to introduce the host to a deflated virus in hopes that an immune response will start, and the body will make memory cells for immunity to combat the virus if encountered again. As nurses, it is important to educate our patients on routine screenings and vaccinations to promote optimal health in the patient populations. As with vaccinations, communities that have a high vaccination rate of certain vaccines such as Covid-19 vaccine, have a lower incidence in new cases of Covid-19 virus. Communities that are not well saturated with vaccination of Covid-19 are prone to seeing rises in active Covid-19 cases and hospitals can become overwhelmed therefore limiting the number of beds available or resources to care for those patients. Overall, the vaccination saturation of Covid-19 reduces the poor health outcomes such as need for hospitalization or deaths (Moghadas et al., 2021).
Reference
Moghadas, S. M., Vilches, T. N., Zhang, K., Wells, C. R., Shoukat, A., Singer, B. H., Meyers, L. A., Neuzil, K. M., Langley, J. M., Fitzpatrick, M. C.,