Identification Of A Population In Your Community

Overview: As a community of practice, your task for this week is to  collaborate with professionals across the health care system. With your  community of practice, in the Discussion, find a gap in care or social  determinant that often results in poor health care outcomes. You will  begin to take the lead in advocating for and collaborating with others  to improve the health care outcomes for populations at risk.

Practicum Discussion: During this week, you will identify a  population at risk in your community. This population will be the basis  for your Practicum Discussions and your individual presentations over  the next 6 weeks, as well as the focus of your final PowerPoint  presentation in Week 6. To review, a population is a group of  individuals who share a common environmental or personal characteristic,  such as obese individuals who are at risk for diabetes or  cardiovascular disease (populations at risk) or those individuals who  are otherwise healthy and could stay healthy if they do not develop  risky behaviors (populations of interest). An example of this is  teenagers who don’t yet smoke but might consider it due to peer pressure  (Stanhope & Lancaster, 2016). Some of the topics you might consider  are vaccination compliance, obesity rates among children and adults,  teenage pregnancy, or infectious diseases such as Norwalk virus, genital  warts, or sexually transmitted diseases/infections. You might look also  at emerging public health problems such as Chagas or the Zika virus.  Some of the places you might consider looking for information to  substantiate and support your ideas about populations at risk in your  communities are your local health department, the CDC, and the many  evidence-based websites that the CDC supports, such as the CDC Wonder  (http://wonder.cdc.gov/). You may also review the work of other  community groups that focus on improving health care outcomes for your  community. You should begin to support your selection of population and  ideas about their health care problems through the use of health data  and scholarly literature.

Please address the following points in your Practicum Discussion:

• Briefly describe your community and then describe your practice setting.
• What are the determinants of health in your community?  (https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/about/foundation-health-measures/Determinants-of-Health)
• What are the most prevalent health problems in your community or in your practice?
• Choose a population at risk and describe the health problem specific to that population. Remember t