Professional Development Of Nursing Professionals
ANSWERS
Health equity is achieved when everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. Nurses are well positioned to play a major role in addressing the underlying causes of poor health by understanding and recognizing the wide range of factors that influence how well and long people live, helping to create individual- and community-targeted solutions, and facilitating and working with interdisciplinary and multisector teams and partners to implement those solutions. Nurses have the potential to reshape the landscape of health equity over the next decade by expanding their roles, working in new settings and new ways, and markedly expanding efforts to partner with communities and other sectors. However, for the United States to make substantial progress in achieving health equity, it will need to devote resources and attention to the conditions affecting people’s health and expand investments in building nurse capacity. Moreover, nursing schools must shift education, training, and mindsets to support nurses’ new and expanded roles. Awareness activities identify the social risks and assets of defined patients and populations. Ask people about their access to transportation. Adjustment Activities that focus on altering clinical care to accommodate identified social barriers. Reduce the need for in-person health care appointments using other options, such as telehealth appointments. Assistance Activities that reduce social risk by assisting in connecting patients with relevant social care resources. Provide transportation vouchers so that patients can travel to health care appointments. Vouchers can be used for ride-sharing services or public transit. Alignment Activities undertaken by healthcare systems to understand existing social care assets in the community, organize them to facilitate synergies, and invest in and deploy them to affect health outcomes positively. Invest in community ride-sharing or time-bank programs. Advocacy Activities in which healthcare organizations work with partner social care organizations to promote policies that facilitate the creation and redeployment of assets or resources to address health and social needs. Work to promote policies that fundamentally change the transportation infrastructure within the community.
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