Chapter 10 Community Health and Minorities

     First and foremost, it's interesting to know that America is the world's first truly multiracial democracy. The majority of the U.S. are white, non-latino Americans (67%), and the remaining 33% are racial and ethnic minorities. It seems there have been a lot of push toward equality in healthcare for racial and ethnic minorities. There was a National effort formed by Clinton to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities. It's purpose was to enhance efforts in (1) preventing disease, (2) promoting health, and (3) delivering care to racial and ethnic minority communities.
     There were also brief rules made in the 1980s for race and ethnic standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting. This was a way to better operationalize race and ethnicity, though it was important to note that categories of race are more of a social category than biological, self-reported data regarding race and ethnicity may be unreliable because of the varied cultures and heritages and multiples races, and also many nonfederal health data systems do not collect self-reported race or ethnicity data.
     There was a lot of data in chapter ten on each individual race and ethnic group of individuals. One fact that seemed to stick out was the fact that the poverty rate of American Indians and Alaska Natives is 25.3%, which is the highest among all racial and ethnic groups.
     Refugees, being the new population in the country, put a lot of strain on public and private health services. Some problems including lack of jobs, new competition, strain on budgets for school and health, further burden on the human, health, and mental health services, and cultural barriers. Furthermore, the diseases are more prevalent because they can be seen across the racial and ethnic groups. These can be noted as infant mortality, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and HIV/AIDS.
     In conclusion, culture is a vital factor in both how community health professionals deliver services and how community members respond to community health programs. The communities in the U.S. need empowerment and equality for it's members and the minorities as well. Hopefully in the future, by 2050, when minorities are nearly half of the population, we will find a better balance.
    

Chapter 8: Adolescents, Young Adults, and Adults

It is during this period in life, that certain lifestyle decisions are made that will have long term influences on health in later years of life.

Much of the physical threat to adolescents and young adults stems from their behavior rather than disease. Seventy five percent of all mortality can be attributed to accidental injury, suicide and homicide. Many adolescents and young adults are exposed to considerable risk from STD's and pregnancy by participating in unprotected sex.

The younger population are susceptible to deleterious behaviors such as: substance abuse, fighting and weapon carrying. The health status of these ages as a whole group could be improved by reducing these high risk behaviors. Many people agree that many health problems could be improved from regular screenings and preventative healthcare, but that's not always an option, as the chapter shows. Many adults don't enjoy the benefits of insurance from it simply being too costly or not working at all.

Many health problems originate from social and cultural environments in which people have been raised and live, and the cultural and social norms. Unfortunately, many children are born a raised into families that don't always practice the best healthy choices. Many adolescents start smoking and drinking at an early age because it's provided for them at home and there's no structure around restricting it's use.

Chapter 7

This chapter discusses maternal, infant, and child health. The United States has made a dramatic improvement in decreasing the infant mortality rate; however, we are still one of the countries with the highest rate. Half of the pregnancies are unintended in the United States. This affects the children because some women may not realize they are pregnant so they are not receiving the prenatal health care necessary. This may lead to fetal alcohol syndrome for a lot of children. I found the fact that our country is 28th in infant mortality is outrageous because our medical system is one of the most advanced in the world. We are receiving funding from title nine and the establishment of family planning clinics has started to improve the maternal and child health of our nation.

Chapter 6

The School Health Program: A Component of Community Health

A coordinated school health program (CSHP) is defined as “an organized set of policies, procedures, and activities designed to protect, promote, and improve the health and well being of students and staff, thus improving the student’s ability to learn.” A CSHP takes a lot of time and effort from many different people, the people who work together to plan and put in place a school health program are referred to as the school health council. For a council to be successful it is important to have a wide variety of members, administrators, food service workers, counseling personnel, maintenance workers, medical personnel, social workers, parents, students, and teachers.

Even though school’s main concern is to educate students, it is hard to educate an unhealthy student. “Health of children and their learning are reciprocally related.” School health policies are written statements that provide a framework to guide all those who work within the program. There are many steps to developing this policy and these steps include, indentifying the policy development team, assessing the districts needs, prioritizing needs and developing an action plan, drafting a policy, building awareness and support, adopting and implementing the policy, maintaining, measuring, and evaluating.

School health education is defined as “planned sequential, K-12 curriculum that addresses the physical, mental, emotional, and social dimensions of health. School health education could play a large role in reducing serious health problems in the United States. The program should focus on the following issues, alcohol and drug free lifestyle, healthy eating, mental and emotional health, personal health and wellness, physical activity, safety/unintentional injury prevention, sexual health, tobacco free lifestyle, and violence prevention.

As stated in the reading school health education could play a big part in reducing some of the serious health problems we have in the United States. However it is alarming how much time or lack of time is spent on health education. It was pretty in our class discussions to only have a semester or two of gym, and a semester of health but we have to spend four years in english classes, three years in math classes, two years in science and social studies classes. What make health less important than the classes we have to spend more time in? In fact it could be argued that health educational classes are more important because it will affect every single one of us for the rest of our lives.