Purdue North Central Community Health Nursing Students along with Franciscan St. Anthony Health presented the culmination of extensive community research and assessment of La Porte County with their PNC Poster Presentation.
"This is about the community and our community partners that we have by partnering with St. Anthony Health," said Associate Professor of PNC's Nursing Department, Peggy Rose. "They are required to do a community health needs assessment, a new requirement under the affordable care act."
This assessment requires that St. Anthony Health, every three years, go out and survey the community, identify problems and demonstrate that they have developed a plan to address the issues. Rose's students from the previous semester along with the help of St. Anthony went into the La Porte Community, did surveys and assessed if there was a need to fix problems.
"The assessment that came out of the 600 surveys from residents of La Porte County and focus groups were two main health issues," said Rose. "One was the issues of substance use and abuse and the other is the availability of mental health services.
PNC's Nursing students then took this data and went out into the community again and gathered objective data on what problems existed and what services are available in the community.
"Next semester we plan on taking this same information and developing programs that we can use to help people and implement them in communities along with St. Anthony's assistance," said Rose. "More specifically, we're looking to go into schools and address the issue of primary prevention and promotion when it comes to substance abuse to kids of earlier ages."
The development of this ambitious project developed through Rose's Community Health Nursing classes, which utilized the act of community assessment, considered by PNC Nursing as a vital part of the medical industry. Student nurses would do community assessment every semester, completing their studies with binders of data. When students would ask what would become of this data, most often it would fall to the wayside, only to be used for grading purposes.
Rose felt that wasting this data was pointless and wanted to take action to better utilize the student's efforts. St Anthony felt that this was a perfect opportunity to further their partnership with Purdue and decided to team up to utilize this data being produced every year.
"In terms of community response we'ver had some mixed responses when it comes to substance abuse, when it comes to basic assessment, however, they're very well received and people are very willing and proud to talk about their community and share their thoughts on what needs to be fixed," said Rose.
Through these combined efforts, Rose and the rest of the PNC Nursing Department hope that by working together with both St. Anthony and the rest of the community, they can achieve their goal of serving the community and giving both the students and La Porte county the attention and care they desire.