Question

A community nurse finds that toxic industrial waste is being dumped illegally into a landfill in a section of town where low-income residents live. Respond to the following questions:

As a nurse advocating for this population, what steps should she take once learning about this?

How would YOU feel if this was happening in the community where you live?

Answer 1

A community is a group of people in a specific location, which includes places where people live, work and go to school. Community health nursing is usually practiced in geographic locations like cities and rural areas. A community health nurse is the one that incorporates evidenced-based research along with advances in science and new approaches for improving the health. These practices take into consideration the cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds of the people in the community to ensure appropriate interaction and sensitivity when working with them.

In the above mentioned case as a community nurse the following steps need to be taken:

• Firstly educate/provide awareness to the people in the community about the illegal dumping of the waste
• To plan on educational assemblies so as to educate them on the adverse effects on the health of the surrounding families due to the dumping of toxic substances
• Can create a strategic plan for protecting the environmental quality along with the health of the people in the community.
• Submit the plan to the higher officials which include the methods of assessing and diagnostic threats to the environment of the community
• Advocate for community actions to incorporate renewable sources of energy, waste management etc..
• Expand interdisciplinary health-care teams to reduce adverse impacts from health-care sector upon the climate and health
• Identify mitigation strategies for waste reduction and safe waste disposal
• Upstream recommendations focus on promoting sustainable practices an increasing the public's awareness of the evidence linking their health with the environmental health

Above discussed are the steps to be taken as a nurse advocation the population.

If this was happening in the community if live i would take the responsibility of communicating and educating the people of the community by identifying a community aggregate at highest risk of exposure, determining the potential or actual health response, citing related host and environmental factors, and correlating any existing epidemiologic data that may substantiate the nursing diagnosis to illustrate the concept.