An Epidemic in The Community

 An Epidemic in The Community

From the case scenario, it is clear that Debbie is a nurse at one of the local health departments in a small county facing challenges related to outbreaks. Looking at the rate of how young Hispanic men have come to the health department and each diagnosed with tuberculosis, it is essential that Debbie take a vital step to ensure the disease is mitigated among migrants. Debbie should take a step to start a basic, detailed assessment that will include observations and questions concerning environmental exposure (Stanhope & Lancaster, 2016). Also, as a nurse, education is critical based on the scenario; this means that she needs to educate each migrant worker on how quickly tuberculosis can spread through the use of the epidemiology triangle. Given that migrants live close to each other as family members, there is a need to educate each worker on how tuberculosis as a disease can spread using the epidemiology triangle. Since migrants live close to their family members, it is important for Debbie to educate these folks on the signs and symptoms of tuberculosis and how it is transmitted. By doing that, it will help control the spread of TB to the community.

The important thing that Debbie needs to do is ensure that she manages to mitigate TB within the community because the disease is extremely contagious. Having primary, secondary, and tertiary intervention plan in mind, Debbie should ensure that she act faster and quickly to TB in the community. Based on the scenario, the host, in this case, is a Hispanic community, and the agent is TB bacteria. Debbie needs to intervene to mitigate the spread of the diseases in the community. The primary intervention should include educating the community about a level of prevention and basic understanding of TB. This should start with a town hall meeting where she would take it as an opportunity to explain the disease and its mode of transmission (Stanhope & Lancaster, 2016). Then, Debbie should host an open house where the community can come for free TB skin testing vaccination and screening on the secondary intervention. Finally, in tertiary prevention, Debbie will have to continue making follow-up care for the patient that would be found to be positive for TB by Directly Observed Therapy. This is an important method that helps observe patients who are already exposed to the disease and are taking medication.

Although the intervention by Debbie in his community is important, a similar intervention cannot be applied to my community. This is because in rural communities where there is a large magnitude of people, such as intervention cannot work unless it is beneficial to the patient. Enhancing such intervention would be expensive as nurses will need to have a plan to work in combination to ensure all patients are taking medications. It is significant that intervention of TB in the community is quite complicated because they are some high-risk populations, such as people who use illicit drugs (Deiss, Rodwell & Garfein, 2017). For instance, the highest number of African Americans and Non-Hispanic males and females in my community are non-US-born. Within my community, some consideration needs to be made because diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of TB can be extremely different depending on the group of individuals in my community. Different from the Debbie intervention in my community, I will first investigate how TB spreads as that will act as a significant way to prevent the diseases in my community (World Health Organization, 2021). Moving forward, I would notify the health department of my community infected people so that they can be isolated, thus managing signs and symptoms of the diseases. 

References

Deiss, R., Rodwell, T., & Garfein, R. (2017). Tuberculosis and illicit drug use: Review and Update. Retrieved April 17, 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3110742

Stanhope, M., & Lancaster, J. (2016). The public health nursing population-centered health care in the community of Missouri.

World Health Organization, W. (2021). Tuberculosis (TB). Retrieved April 17, 2022, from https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosis