Reflection on Learning

The healthcare issue within my community

Every human being needs to access quality healthcare so as to live a long and peaceful life. Nonetheless, 1 in 10 residents in my community does not have access to healthcare. The major cause of ill health and limited access to healthcare is poverty. In my community, people without a steady source of income have limited access to healthcare. There is a strong correlation between poverty and poor health. Individuals with a good source of income can afford better healthcare. Approximately, 70 percent of residents in my community are uninsured due to poverty (Novak & Anders, 2019). Lack of insurance means that the individuals forego preventive care. The residents wait for long until the illness is severe before accessing healthcare. Children from poor households do not receive any health care services thus exposing them to long-term illness (Semega, Kollar, Creamer, & Mohanty, 2019). Poverty exposes the residents to unfavorable living conditions such as sleeping on the streets, poor diet, and exposure to diseases. As such, poverty affects people’s health across the entire life course.

The type of healthcare policy to advocate for in an effort to change this issue

In most cases, discussions about health policies begin with discovering ways to reduce unhealthy behavior such as smoking, binge drinking, and increasing physical exercise. Further, the discussions center around how to increase people's access to healthcare by reducing the number of uninsured individuals. However, access to healthcare is determined by other factors such as employment, food security, and housing. These material factors determine people's exposure to biohazards that increase diseases' prevalence. Therefore, the healthcare policy should consider the material factors that increase exposure to poor health. Consequently, I will advocate for a social policy as the incorporation of health policy. Essentially, the policy will strengthen the residents’ health through dietary interventions, stress management, and the reduction of unhealthy behavior. In this case, the healthcare policy will involve volunteers from the community to participate in fundraising. The funds will be used in financing training people from poor households on good nutrition. The programs will offer meals for homeless people.

Type of campaign to launch in order to gather a network of support

To convince community members to participate in my healthcare policies, I will design a volunteer engagement program. Through the program, the residents will be informed by the health policy in churches, schools, and other public gatherings. This initiative's goal is to increase resident's awareness about the program and develop a wide network of support. Additionally, the volunteer engagement policy will interact with residents through social media platforms. I will post my initiatives on the community's Facebook and Twitter pages (Surani, et al., 2017). I will also create a WhatsApp group to inform people about the healthcare policy. gathering a network of support means keeping people informed about the healthcare policy and convincing them to participate in the campaign.

Tweet

Poverty and healthcare are related. poor people cannot access good healthcare services. I advocate for social policy as health policy.

References Novak, L., & Anders, S. (2019). Improving the effectiveness of health information technology: the case for situational analytics. Applied clinical informatics, 10(04), 771-776. Semega, J., Kollar, M., Creamer, J., & Mohanty, A. (2019, June 12). Income and Poverty in the United States. Retrieved from United States Census Bureau: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-266.pdf Surani, Z., Hirani, R., Elias, A., Quisenberry, L., Varon, J., Surani, S., & Surani, S. (2017). Social media usage among health care providers. BMC research notes, 1-5.