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Community Education Experience
FirstName MiddleInitial(s) LastName
Institutional Affiliation (Department Institution)
Course Number and Name
Instructor Name and Title
Assignment Due Date
Community Education Experience
Blood pressure measures the force of blood pushing against the walls of your arteries when the heart pumps blood (National Institute on Aging, 2021). When a healthcare professional checks your blood pressure, they wrap a cuff around your upper arm and inflate it. They listen for the pulse at the brachial artery. The systolic blood pressure is recorded when the healthcare worker hears the first heartbeat. They deflate the cuff and listen until the pulse disappears. The diastolic blood pressure is recorded at this point. Systolic blood pressure denotes the pressure exerted when the heart contracts and pushes blood into your vascular system. At the same time, diastolic blood pressure shows the pressure in your blood vessels when the heart relaxes. Normal blood pressure is less than 120/80mmHg. Elevated blood pressure ranges from 120-129 systolic and less than 80 diastolic (National Institute on Aging, 2021). High blood pressure is 130/80 or higher. The higher your blood pressure, the more you are at risk for other health problems, such as heart disease, heart attack, and stroke.
Uncontrolled high blood pressure is a common major health problem in older adults due to physiological and physical changes in the body as they age, like arteriosclerosis (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022). Forty-five percent of adults with uncontrolled high blood pressure have a blood pressure of 140/90 or higher. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2022), 50% of men have high blood pressure versus 40% of women in the United States. Statistics also show that 56% of black adults, 48% of white adults, 46% of Asian adults, and 39% of Hispanic adults have high blood pressure (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022). High blood pressure often has no symptoms, which is why it is called “the Silent Killer.” In 2020, more than 670,000 deaths were primarily related to high blood pressure in the United States.
Community Assessment
The Better Health Clinic in Fayetteville, North Carolina, offers free seminars on teaching diabetic health and management to groups of adults usually aged 50 and over. The seminar usually has more women than men, and Whites are the highest racially represented group, followed closely by African Americans. It was suggested to have a guest speaker come in to educate these individuals on blood pressure and its management. In the Bragg Boulevard area of Fayetteville, there are a lot of assisted living facilities for the elderly that consist of older adults who live alone, and others are autonomous senior citizens who still provide for their adult children. There are old grocery stores and two pharmacies in this large area. Many doctors’ offices and hospitals are far from the Bragg Boulevard area surrounding the Better Health Clinic. The group of older adults I plan to educate on blood pressure and its management will learn to live healthier lifestyles to reduce the risk of high blood pressure and heart disease. High blood pressure commonly affects older adults; thus, blood pressure management education will benefit them since they get to learn how to monitor and manage the condition.
Fayetteville, NC, is in the Southeast area of the state. Its neighboring cities are Fort Bragg, Stedman, Raeford, Dunn, Sanford, and Hope Mills, North Carolina. Fayetteville is in the Sandhills of North Carolina between the coastal plain to the southeast and Piedmont to the northwest and is also built on the Cape Fear River (Fayetteville NC, n.d). By July 2021, the city had 208,771 inhabitants, 42.7% white, 42.6% African American, 12.8% Hispanic, 3.1% Asian, and 0.9% Native Americans (US Census Bureau, 2021). Persons aged 65 and over account for 12% of this population, and females are 49.6%. In 2015 there were 4,594 births at Cape Fear Valley Hospital and High smith Rainey Hospital, the only two hospitals in the city. In that same year, there were 1,925 deaths in Fayetteville. About half of those who died succumbed to high blood pressure, meaning that about one-quarter of the population being born also dying in the same year (North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, 2022). Hypertension is high in North Carolina. Statistics show that 44% of residents aged 25 years or older without a high school diploma have been diagnosed with high blood pressure (United Health Foundation, 2022). This percentage is higher than the average American rate of 33.2%. Blood pressure management education is crucial in Fayetteville to help this population manage their blood pressure adequately.
Data Analysis
The older adult community targeted by this health education program has many strengths. The senior population has good health-seeking behavior due to high burden chronic conditions, leading them to seek medical services more frequently than other demographics. Hypertensive patients, for example, seek care in primary health services often. They also receive health education at the Better Health Clinic regularly. These strengths are health assets because they facilitate the implementation of the blood pressure (BP) education program. The senior citizens will likely benefit from the community education experience and apply the proposed interventions to improve their health.
The BP management community education experience has one main objective, which is increasing the proportion of adults with hypertension whose blood pressure is under control. The education plan targets screening the adults for high blood pressure and educating them about the benefits of medication compliance and necessary lifestyle changes that can help keep their blood pressure under control. According to Healthy People 2030 (n.d.), “Controlling or lowering blood pressure can help prevent chronic kidney disease, heart attack, heart failure, and stroke.” Therefore, the Healthy People 2030 objective “HDS-05: Increase control of high blood pressure in adults” applies to this program because it directly addresses the goal of the community education experience. Older adults’ physiology exposes them to high blood pressure. Educating them on hypertension, the risk factors, its management, and how to modify lifestyle factors to maintain blood pressure within acceptable levels is crucial to achieving the identified objective.
The nursing diagnoses that apply to this community stem from their clinical characteristics. Because of their age, older adults suffer comorbid conditions, consequently increasing their anxiety (Gao et al., 2018). They also experience difficulty accessing information due to sensory and cognitive impairments. They are hard of hearing, have poor memory, and are often visually challenged. They have a knowledge deficit related to low health literacy and cognitive limitation, as evidenced by the seniors’ verbalization of not understanding hypertension and their insufficient skills in maintaining desired blood pressure levels. They also experience anxiety related to the unknown outcome of the disease, as evidenced by the adults’ expressing concern about their prognosis, restlessness, and verbalizing their fear of complications. Health education is necessary to allay anxiety and teach them how to control the condition.
Education Plan for Older Adults with Hypertension
Working closely with the local caregivers and health facilities, I will create flyers to notify the locals about a seminar, its purpose, venue, and time. The community’s social hall will be an ideal place due to its central location for the target Fayetteville older population. For the seminar to reach as many people as possible, it will be held for a whole week to give the locals time to choose an ideal day for attending. During the seminar, the first thing for every attendee will be taking their blood pressure measurement and the current medications they are taking. For the learning sessions, I will prepare brochures and summarize the information with illustrations in a PowerPoint presentation. Before commencing the learning sessions, the first few slides will contain questions to test the audience’s knowledge of key areas of hypertension subject. The pre-test questions will be open-ended and open for anyone in the audience to answer. The questions will cover key areas of the seminar teachings:
What are the normal blood pressure ranges?
What are the elevated blood pressure ranges?
What are the different stages of hypertension?
What are the risk factors of hypertension?
When should someone stop taking antihypertensive drugs?
How often should you check your blood pressure once diagnosed with the condition?
What are some of the recommended lifestyle modifications to keep blood pressure under control?
Similar questions will be asked in the post-test to assess the audiences’ understanding of the seminar education. The attendees will be expected to complete the questions in a written format or orally for those that cannot write. The seminar session will focus on educating the locals on the importance of regular blood pressure monitoring, demonstration of how to use the digital machine to perform blood pressure tests at home, and the importance of record keeping and sharing the data with their primary caregivers for professional advice (Verma et al., 2021). The second learning session will focus on drug compliance by educating the locals importance of sticking to the prescribed doses, the need to contact the primary physician before switching or changing the prescription, if need be, and using modern technologies as reminders and pill counters to avoid missing some doses, especially for those with comorbid conditions.
The last session will focus on lifestyle modifications where the locals will learn about the importance of engaging in regular exercises, maintaining a healthy weight, eating a low-sodium diet, quitting smoking, and limiting alcohol intake (Verma et al., 2021). Part of nutritional advice on healthy eating will involve helping the locals come up with balanced healthy diets based on their socioeconomic status. At the end of the seminar, I will provide those with alcohol intake or smoking problems with rehabilitation contact centers and other support groups available in the community.
References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2022, September 1). High blood pressure. https://www.cdc.gov/bloodpressure/index.htm
Fayetteville NC. (n.d.). About Fayetteville. https://www.fayettevillenc.gov/our-city/community/about-fayetteville
Gabrani, J., Schindler, C., & Wyss, K. (2021). Health-seeking behavior among adults and elderly with a chronic health condition (s) in Albania. Frontiers in Public Health, 9, 616014. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2021.616014
Gao, G., Pieczkiewicz, D., Kerr, M., Lindquist, R., Chi, C. L., Maganti, S., & Monsen, K. A. (2018). Exploring older adults’ strengths, problems, and well-being using de-identified electronic health record data. In AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings (Vol. 2018, p. 1263–1272). American Medical Informatics Association. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6371293/
Healthy People 2030. (n.d.). Increase control of high blood pressure in adults – HDS-05. https://health.gov/healthypeople/objectives-and-data/browse-objectives/heart-disease-and-stroke/increase-control-high-blood-pressure-adults-hds-05
North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. (2022). Statistics and reports: Vital statistics. https://schs.dph.ncdhhs.gov/data/vital.cfm
United Health Foundation. (2022). Explore high blood pressure in North Carolina: 2021 annual report. America’s Health Rankings. https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measure/Hypertension/population/hypertension_less_HS/state/NC
United States Census Bureau. (2021). QuickFacts: Fayetteville City, North Carolina. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fayettevillecitynorthcarolina
Verma, N., Rastogi, S., Chia, Y. C., Siddique, S., Turana, Y., Cheng, H. M., … & Kario, K. (2021). Non-pharmacological management of hypertension. The Journal of Clinical Hypertension, 23(7), 1275-1283. https://doi.org/10.1111/jch.14236