In my small rural community, there are a lot of elderly people experiencing health inequity and health disparities. Due to the current nursing shortage, home healthcare agencies are limited in how many families they can care for leaving chronic illnesses unmanaged. With no long-term care facilities within miles of the area, families are left with the stress of who is going to look after their family members until their final days. There are many issues causing health disparities within the current United States healthcare system. Insufficient insurance coverage, rising healthcare costs, and widening disparity in access to healthcare services have adversely affected the elderly population, and today, healthcare costs are generating major problems for welfare states in the short-term and long term (Yamada et al., 2015). According to Yamada et al., (2015) one of the major concerns creating health disparities with the elderly population is the rising cost of healthcare services in the United States. Many elderly patients have neglected to seek care due to the fear that insurance will not cover the service, and they will be unable to afford care. With the increasing costs of healthcare here in the United States, patients have neglected to follow up with outpatient treatment leading to an increased rate of hospital readmissions for chronic conditions such as COPD, and Congestive Heart Failure.
Utilizing my specialty as a nurse educator, the main focus of eliminating the disparities that this population faces would be to develop and instruct better educational methods and programs for better outpatient care within the home. First, nurses need to be aware of implicit bias or stereotypical assumptions about patients with different backgrounds, and nurses must invite and support all patients’ participation in all aspects of care, irrespective of patients’ levels of education, language, or racial or ethnic backgrounds or clinical characteristics (Oruche & Zapolski, 2020). According to Oruche and Zapolski (2020), healthcare agencies must employ an educational system that is more patient-centered. For example, applauding patients for making it to appointments, and working collaboratively to increase access to healthcare and prevent disparities. Within the Christian worldview, everyone regardless of race, socioeconomic status, and inability to pay should be allowed to receive the same access to healthcare as anyone else. Educating the client one-on-one allows us to give them the information to succeed and flourish within the society that God has created during his time on this earth so that they may help one another and treat others to live out their lives with dignity and respect. Our main job is to promote human beings to be successful outside the healthcare facility to grow and prosper through our healing powers for strength.
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