Question

Use Cardiovascular disease for the disease in my community

Implementing a Public Health Program

Using the South University Online Library or the Internet, research about the ten leading causes of death in the United States. List all the diseases and select one disease. Research further on your selected disease.
Based on research, create a 5- to 7-page Microsoft Word document that includes:

A proposal for a public health program to address that disease within your community.

An outline of the steps you will undertake to evaluate the program you have proposed.

An evaluation design for your program.

An identification and collection of data to evaluate your program.

An explanation of the method determined for collecting the data.

Conclusions from the data and justification of those conclusions.

Recommendations for improvements to your program and a plan to communicate those recommendations.

Answer 1

The ten leading causes of death in United states of America are:

1. Heart diseases
2. Cancer
3. Chronic lower respiratory disease
4. Accidents
5. Stroke
6. Alzheimer's Disease
7. Diabetes
8. Influenza and pneumonia
9. Kidney diseases
10. Suicide

Out of this the 50 % of deaths are contributed by the top three leading cause.

HEART DISEASES: The heart diseases causes death of about 1 in every 4 deaths per year, affecting significantly more men than women. The total cases found over a year is estimated to be 614,348 and the percentage of total death is 23.4 percent. The major heart diseases are plaque related in which plaque tends to get deposited in the walls of the arteries that narrows the lumen. This makes the flow of blood difficult and causes heart attack and stroke. The other types of heart diseases include Angina, Arrhythmias and Heart Failure.

The major warning sign and symptoms that one should be aware for prevention and early identification of the disease are:

• Chest pain or discomfort
• Pain in other body parts like shoulders, neck,jaw or upper abdomen
• Breathlessness
• Nausea, Lightheadednesss
• Cold sweats.

In order to protect heart, the blood pressure and cholestrol levels should be kept under control. To gain this target several lifestyle and dietary modifications needs to done.

• Diet should be low in salt, should include refined sugars, total fat, saturated fat and cholesterol, fresh fruits and vegetables.
• Regular exercise (atleast 150 minutes a week)
• Avoid smoking and alcohol
• Reduce stress level
• Follow the instructions before taking any medicines and OTC drugs to ensure safety.

PUBLIC HEALTH PROGRAM: The programs that are organized based on the health issues and health needs of the community is called a public health program. These programs not only identifies the needs but also helps the community with education about measures of prevention, and treatment of diseases with effective community participation

Program proposal: Development and implementation of plan to reduce number of deaths due to cardiovascular diseases in community.

Steps for evaluation:

• Identify the resource persons in the community who would help in implementing the program by ensuring proper community participation.
• Collect the healthcare staffs who have adequate knowledge to about the disease process and what topics should be included in the program.
• Find the source that would provide fund for the program implementation.
• Describe the need, expected affects, activities, resources, stages and context fo this program.
• Gather appropriate evidence to support the need of this program.
• Develop goals to be attained at the end of the program and tools to measure the outcome.

Evaluation Design: The design used for this health program will be a non- experimental design. In this type of design, intervention will be carried out in a specific selected group of people and the response of the group before and after the intervention will be evaluated in order to frame conclusion of the program

Data Collection: Questionnaire and survey method will be used for data collection. In order to collect data from the community, the group will be surveyed by the healthcare team before the implementation of interventions and they would be requested to undergo a questionnaire designed for data collection. The same questionnaire will also be used after the intervention in order to evaluate the outcome.

Conclusions: The data collected on evaluation will provide conclusions to the program implemented. In the above scenario, during pretest, the group was found to have lack of knowledge regarding the causative factors, warnings signs and symptoms, preventative measures about the cardiovascular disease. But after implementation of the program, the post test helped us to draw conclusions:

• adequate knowledge helped people to identify the warning signs of the diseases. The people who were not aware about the causative factors or clinical features of the disease as evidenced by the pretest questionnaire was found to be able to correctly identify the causes and manifestations of the disease in the post test questionnaire.
• the program encouraged people to make lifestyle and dietary modifications needed to prevent the disease. The people became aware of the benefits of regular walking and exercise in the lifestyle. They were also encouraged to adopt the dietary changes like low salt, low fat diet.
• Reduced the frequency of smoking and alcohol consumption by the people with the fear of mortality associated with the disease.

Recommendations:

• Dietician for nutritional classes should be included who can effectively deal with the dietary concerns of the people.
• Encourage people to develop campaign to quit smoking and alcohol.

In order to apply these recommendations, the resource persons of the community are provided details of the persons who can be communicated to raise up a campaign. Moreover they are also educated about how to access the healthcare facilities and to report any other health related issues prevalent in the community.