Need help: Community diagnosis

it sounds to me like you are being asked to do a care plan on a specific community. in this case, the community would be your patient. a community diagnosis would be your nursing diagnosis(es) for the community you have chosen based upon the problem(s) you determine it has. objectives would be your nursing goals and outcomes. limitations would be restrictions that will affect achieving maximum goals; these would be underlying problems (in a patient this might be an underlying chronic disease) that you cannot do anything about but have to make allowances for. (for example: if you have a stroke patient who has a right sided paralysis the patient's goals that he can achieve are going to be limited by the paralysis he has.) a community might be restricted by economics, education, ethnics, social networks, culture, politics and any other number of things. your rationales, as always, are the logical reasons (why) your interventions are going to work.

since you are assigned the introduction part of this assignment, i would think that your part in this would coincide with the first step of the care planning process. that is, assessment and data collection. for a patient, this would include a review of systems and physical assessment. for a community, it would include going through a history of the community and then doing a physical walk through to evaluate it.

do you know specifically what you are to be assessing for in the community you have been assigned? usually, for these projects, it is the health resources available to the residents who live there. this includes all things that affect a person's health: garbage collection, water purification, sewage, air pollution, availability of health care (hospitals, clinics), police protection, etc. i would look at maslow's hierarchy of needs to make sure you are including all human health needs. if you have a textbook on community nursing these things should be listed in it. otherwise, you will need to go to a library and do some research on what a healthy community should ideally be. use that as a perfect template for your assessment of the community you have chosen. when you make your assessment of your chosen community, the things your chosen community doesn't have when compared to your perfect template will then be your abnormal assessment items that you will develop into nursing diagnoses for the community, develop goals for and interventions. the problem you are going to have (the same one we had when we had when we did this when i was a senior) is that there really are no nursing care plans out there for you to look at on this. you have to figure this out on your own. so, your part, the introduction, will be to explain what the perfect community should be and how your chosen community for this project matches up to that. the other people in your group should have the responsibility of determining the problems (community diagnoses, limitations), objectives (goals) and interventions (with rationales).

1. assessment (collect data)

   
   

2. nursing diagnosis (group your assessment data, shop and match your abnormal assessment data to likely nursing diagnoses, decide on the nursing diagnosis to use)

   
   

3. planning (write measurable goals/outcomes and nursing interventions)

   
   

4. implementation (initiate the care plan)

   
   

5. evaluation (determine if goals/outcomes have been met)

   
   

good luck!

you should check out the nursing student assistance forum on allnurses for help with student assignments (https://allnurses.com/forums/f205/).

welcome to allnurses! :welcome:

it seems to me that your introduction should start out with a discussion of the purpose and rationale of what you are doing. this is would be a broad description of your activity. your purpose would be to apply scientific reasoning, critical thinking and problem solving in determining the health care needs of a specific community of patients. the nursing process is a form of scientific reasoning that you will use (because you are nurses). the rationale for doing this by nursing process, a form of the scientific process, is that the scientific process is an established method of organizing and determining problems, proposing ways to solve them, testing these proposals to see if they work and then reassessing as necessary to change or adjust the strategies you use with the final goal(s) being to find acceptable solutions to the problem.

next, you move on to list the objectives for your project. these, in a nutshell, are a description of how you are going to specifically apply the nursing process to this project. i've looked at the objectives you've listed and all three are descriptions of assessment activities. however, assessment is only one step in the nursing process. the nursing process has 5 steps. i would add more objectives so that they include the other 4 steps of the nursing process and follow the sequence in which they are supposed to proceed. this tells your instructor exactly how you intend to proceed with this project and satisfies your job of what the introduction is supposed to do. your objectives should look something like this:

1. to gather basic information from the community to determine the health concerns and needs of the community. [assessment]
   
   
2. to determine what are the resources used by the people in the community in terms of health care. [assessment]
   
   
3. to determine possible factors that affect the health perception of the people and in the community [assessment]
   
   
4. to determine [one, two, or three] major health care needs/concerns of the residents of the community based upon an analysis of the information gathered [identify problem(s)]
   
   
5. to develop predictable, measurable, community centered goals and outcomes that address these identified needs/concerns [develop goals/outcomes]
   
   
6. to develop a plan of action that includes interventions that will help the residents of the community achieve successful solutions for the identified needs/concerns. [develop interventions]
   
   
7. to put the plan into action [implementation]
   
   
8. to evaluate the successfulness of the plan of action [evaluation]
   not sure these last two are feasible to this project for you, but you might want to include these last two items anyway since they are part of the nursing process
   .

i see.. thanks very much for the help..

..another question..how does civil status, religion, nationality,residency (permanent and transient) affects health status of the people in the community?

after we tabulated all data we found out that a high percentage of the population are married, are roman catholic, are of the same nationality and ethnic group and are permanent residents of the community..i just don't know how these affect health status of the community..

...

these are things that you have to know about your country and the groups of people living with it. what you have to do is look at not only the laws of your country, but the rules of the groups that people belong to. there are rules that people have to follow when they belong to any group whether it is religious, ethic, etc. that is the "price" they pay to be a part of it. some of those rules affect how they are able to utlilize healthcare services around them. civilian status are things like whether or not you are a civilian, military or government worker. sometimes this kind of status allows people access to services that other people in the society cannot get. often military (soldiers) have health care provided to them by their country as a benefit for giving their service to their country. some religions put restrictive rules on how their members must behave. for example, the jehovah witnesses will not permit themselves to have transfusions of blood even if it would save their lives. many christian scientists will refuse most kinds of medical treatments. permanent residents of a country are often entitled to tax-supported benefits because they are citizen. someone who is not a permanent resident usually does not have that privilege. here in the u.s. most legal citizens can qualify for medicare and medicaid benefits which are government supported medical benefit programs to help with their healthcare costs while someone who is not a legal resident cannot get those benefits. do not forget about people who are indigent (poor) and do not have money to pay for healthcare. what happens to them in your country? what happens if they get ill and can't afford to get treatment?

when you are talking about community, you are looking at a bigger picture. when you work in a hospital you are working with patients who have been able to get in to the hospital for care. but, in the community you want to look at bigger issues. what is happening to the people who can't get into a hospital or medical clinic for care? how does that happen in the first place? how do people get the health care that they need in your country, and in this community you are studying? what are some of the problems that some people face in getting medical care? (money, are there hospitals and clinics close to them that they can get to easily, is paying for medical treatment a problem for them, do the people even know what kind of medical and health care services are available to them where they live, are some citizens denied service at health care clinics because of their civilian or ethnic status, as health care delivery has changed over the years are some people so stubborn in "old" ways of doing things that they won't change and do things the "new" way, are immigrants or people from another country who can't speak the language afraid or unable to go out into your society to go to a healthcare clinic to get the care they know they need, what if a person is alone and has lost all the members of their family they used to depend on for help to get to appointments with doctors. many of these are social/economic/political issues. these are some of the questions you have to look at. i can't tell you what is going on in your country, but i know what is going on in the u.s. these are the kinds of things you need to be thinking about and addressing in your project.