Community Nursing

Community Nursing

Introduction

Nursing as a profession has been built up over the centuries and more rapidly in recent decades as developments in health sciences demand a quality education, scientific, technical and ethical skills to meet all human responses of patient and their families. Nursing can be defined as, collaborative and autonomous care of people of all ages, groups, families and communities in all settings, sick and well, this all is encompassed by the profession of nursing (D'Antonio, 2010). Nursing promotes the prevention of illness, health and disabled, care of ill and dying people. Promotion of a safe environment, advocacy, research, participation is shaping the patients and health policies and education and health system management are also key nursing roles.

No doubt, the population of patients is getting increasingly diverse day by day due to globalization. Patients now share a wide array of health literacy levels, cultural or linguistic background that is challenging the Nurses with more barriers. Nurses are traditionally responsible for providing care to the patients but this diversity in patient population has entrusted them with an additional responsibility that is educating the patients about health issues related to them (John & Keleher, 2006). It's a fact that in some countries, culture, religion or even language set the context for using and applying the health literacy skills. Nurses enjoy an ideal position to improve health outcomes for culturally diverse patients by facilitating the interconnections between language, culture and health literacy.

The case taken in this essay is based on 56 year old lady, Mrs. Karzai (essay name), whose origin is Afghanistan and lives in Shepparton Victoria in Australia. Mrs. Karzai was suffering with carcinoma and recently got it removed after sigmoid colectomy - a surgical process. The carcinoma can be defined as malignant cancer that occurs through the cells in the endodermal layer during embryogenesis (ACS, 2005). In other words, carcinoma is a tumour tissue that depicts all abnormal properties of malignancy. In addition, Carcinoma can affect the body from inside as well as outside with sever impacts on skin, lungs, or intestine. It also important to know that percentage of carcinoma in cancer is almost 80%, which can begin everywhere in the body of patient. This tumour is usually diagnosed through biopsy. Sigmoid colectomy, on the other hand, can be defined as a surgical procedure to take the carcinoma out by removing the left side of the colon, which is located on the left side of the abdomen as shown in Figure-1.

Figure-1: Carcinoma

Source: ACS, 2005

This procedure also involves the process of reconnecting both the ends once carcinoma is removed (ACS, 2005).

Discussion

In health care, nurses are considered the heart of it. They take different roles everyday in their job, an admirable nurse is always a great help of patients and doctors she serves. In charge of each patient, a nurse works under the directions of the doctors. Pertaining to treatments and medication, she follows doctor's orders and helps help doctors while performing certain procedures. She notifies doctors when patient's condition worsens, ...