NUR3101 – Primary Health Care
Use of Health Literacy as a Preventive Measure for Cardiovascular Diseases
Introduction
Apart from being the major and leading cause of death around the globe, heart diseases pose a significant barrier towards the goals set for the sustainable development of humans. Most importantly, cardiovascular diseases come under the category of noncommunicable diseases and are therefore also considered a global threat to human health. They can be efficiently tracked by the reduction of their incidence brought about via increased awareness and health literacy (Sacco et al., 2016).
Among all the noncommunicable diseases, the cardiovascular diseases alone accounted for the death of 46% of the world population in 2012 (Mendis, 2017). However, declines in the prevalence of the heart diseases has also been observed consequentially due to decreased tobacco usage, improvements in blood pressures at population levels as well as ongoing advancements in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. But, this decrease in the diseased incidence has been found to be more prominent in developed countries as compared to low and middle income countries (Ezzati et al., 2015; Mensah et al., 2017).
- b) Population: outline the rationale for the chosen target population for the project including issues relating to equity and social justice.
Socioeconomically underprivileged population as a target for the current project
Various studies have indicated towards the augmented probability for the prevalence of heart diseases as moving down the socioeconomic slope. Many interventions exist for tackling the issues related to health and its related inequities as being generated from differences in the socioeconomic statuses of various populations of the world. The four most common factors found to be associated with heart diseases in developed countries are education, income, employment and neighborhood socioeconomic conditions. Moreover, cardiovascular diseases have also been found to be the triggers for increasing poverty due to increased monetary burden on the ill and its family. The two thus serve to intensify each other in such circumstances. In addition, the situation is further worsened when there is limited or no health literacy in people belonging to low income areas (Banerjee & Dwivedi, 2016; Burroughs Pena & Bloomfield, 2015; Schultz et al., 2018). Therefore, the basic aim of the current project is to use health literacy for the socioeconomically underprivileged population of the world as a measure to lessen, if not completely prevent, the burden of heart diseases.
- c) Delivery: method of project delivery and outline rationale for why the method of the deliverable was chosen, with evidence of best practice examples.
Method for cardiovascular health literacy delivery
One of the most crucial challenge in nursing practice is the confrontation with the simultaneous management of the comorbid diseases such as the heart diseases along with their respective various risk factors especially in people having high risks. A further challenge is imposed by language and literacy barriers coming along with high risk individuals. Therefore, the first priority to overcome these challenges would be the establishment of staff having not only the relevant language skills but also contain high level of familiarity with the respective cultural norms. Next, it must be ensured that this staff be available for the targeted group of patients as studies have suggested an improvement in the risk factors’ outcomes via these approaches (Saleem et al., 2015; Viswanathan, Duncan, Grigortsuk, & Sreekumar, 2018).
Other steps to deliver health literacy include slowing down the process of assessment by taking more time with patient so as to also assess the patients’ health literacy level and then using common terms instead of specific medical language to make them understand the disease and medicines. Moreover, specific charts or drawings can be used to further enhance the capacity of patients to be familiar with their medicines, their dosage and timings. The number of sessions should be more to deliver limited knowledge each time with repetitions to better develop a deep understanding while maintain patient’s respect as an encouragement and empowerment to make them able to participate themselves in their health (CardioSmart; Diederichs, Jordan, Domanska, & Neuhauser, 2018; Magnani et al., 2018).
References
Banerjee, K., & Dwivedi, L. K. (2016). The burden of infectious and cardiovascular diseases in India from 2004 to 2014. Epidemiology and health, 38, e2016057-e2016057. doi:10.4178/epih.e2016057
Burroughs Pena, M. S., & Bloomfield, G. S. (2015). Cardiovascular disease research and the development agenda in low- and middle-income countries. Global heart, 10(1), 71-73. doi:10.1016/j.gheart.2014.12.006
CardioSmart. Health literacy is critical to heart disease prevention. Retrieved from https://www.cardiosmart.org/news/2018/6/health-literacy-is-critical-to-heart-disease-prevention
Diederichs, C., Jordan, S., Domanska, O., & Neuhauser, H. (2018). Health literacy in men and women with cardiovascular diseases and its association with the use of health care services – Results from the population-based GEDA2014/2015-EHIS survey in Germany. PLOS ONE, 13(12), e0208303. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0208303
Ezzati, M., Obermeyer, Z., Tzoulaki, I., Mayosi, B. M., Elliott, P., & Leon, D. A. (2015). Contributions of risk factors and medical care to cardiovascular mortality trends. Nat Rev Cardiol, 12(9), 508-530. doi:10.1038/nrcardio.2015.82
Magnani, J. W., Mujahid, M. S., Aronow, H. D., Cené, C. W., Dickson, V. V., Havranek, E., . . . Stroke, C. (2018). Health Literacy and Cardiovascular Disease: Fundamental Relevance to Primary and Secondary Prevention: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association. Circulation, 138(2), e48-e74. doi:10.1161/CIR.0000000000000579
Mendis, S. (2017). Global progress in prevention of cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular diagnosis and therapy, 7(Suppl 1), S32-S38. doi:10.21037/cdt.2017.03.06
Mensah, G. A., Wei, G. S., Sorlie, P. D., Fine, L. J., Rosenberg, Y., Kaufmann, P. G., . . . Gordon, D. (2017). Decline in Cardiovascular Mortality: Possible Causes and Implications. Circ Res, 120(2), 366-380. doi:10.1161/circresaha.116.309115
Sacco, R. L., Roth, G. A., Reddy, K. S., Arnett, D. K., Bonita, R., Gaziano, T. A., . . . Zoghbi, W. A. (2016). The Heart of 25 by 25: Achieving the Goal of Reducing Global and Regional Premature Deaths From Cardiovascular Diseases and Stroke: A Modeling Study From the American Heart Association and World Heart Federation. Circulation, 133(23), e674-690. doi:10.1161/cir.0000000000000395
Saleem, F., Hashmi, F., Atif, N., Bukhari, N., Ahsan, M., Saeed, H., . . . Hassali, M. (2015). A Cross Sectional Assessment of Health Literacy among Cardiovascular Patients in Karachi, Pakistan. Health Economics & Outcome Research: Open Access, 01. doi:10.4172/2471-268X.1000101
Schultz, W. M., Kelli, H. M., Lisko, J. C., Varghese, T., Shen, J., Sandesara, P., . . . Sperling, L. S. (2018). Socioeconomic Status and Cardiovascular Outcomes: Challenges and Interventions. Circulation, 137(20), 2166-2178. doi:10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.117.029652
Viswanathan, M., Duncan, R., Grigortsuk, M., & Sreekumar, A. (2018). A Bottom-Up Approach to Understanding Low-Income Patients: Implications for Health-Related Policy. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 46(3), 658-664. doi:10.1177/1073110518804220
