NSG7005 - Week 9 Project - Public Health Analysis Paper

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Public Health Analysis Topic

Lisa Berdinazzi

South University

NSG7005

Dr. Terry

9/10/2024

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an extremely devastating effect on mental health through increased anxiety, depression, and stress levels in all populations. As such, this topic becomes critical to advanced practice nursing since it indicates that the profession shall have to evolve through increased demands for services related to mental health. The intricacies of care, in particular, socially distanced, telehealth-driven, and high in mental health needs for their patients, have made the job all the more challenging for advanced practice nurses. These challenges are closely related to Healthy People 2020's goals, and mental health and well-being are also public health issues. It focused on how prevention, service accessibility, and systemic mental health care integration have made mental health popular in most primary care settings. The epidemic also highlighted inadequacies and reinforced mental health service policies (Tausch et al., 2021). Advanced practice nurses can fill these gaps and help achieve Healthy People 2020, especially in resource-poor and rural settings with fewer mental health providers.

In terms of public health policy analysis, the findings from this research can be applied across various communities in the United States. For example, urban areas might benefit from expanding telehealth services, and rural areas may need funding for mental health infrastructure (McBain et al., 2023). Secondly, knowledge of specific needs within a population—for instance, frontline workers, children, and older people—shall make intervention applicability equitable while tailor-made. This analysis will prove valuable in developing my capstone project as it will give a well-rounded portrait of the mental health implications of the pandemic. It will also present specific recommendations for enhancing mental health, which can help identify and treat patients in clinical practice, considering ethnic and cultural differences.

References

McBain, R. K., Schuler, M. S., Qureshi, N., Matthews, S., Kofner, A., Breslau, J., & Cantor, J. H. (2023). Expansion of Telehealth Availability for Mental Health Care After State-Level Policy Changes From 2019 to 2022. JAMA Network Open, 6(6), e2318045–e2318045. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.18045

Tausch, A., Souza, R. O. e, Viciana, C. M., Cayetano, C., Barbosa, J., & Hennis, A. J. (2021). Strengthening mental health responses to COVID-19 in the Americas: A health policy analysis and recommendations. The Lancet Regional Health – Americas, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lana.2021.100118