Community Resources Paper
Nurses, who make up the majority of the healthcare workforce, interact with patients in a variety of contexts, including clinical areas, public health, and administrative, advocacy, and policy sectors. As public health advocates, nurses collaborate with multiple healthcare agencies and organizations to achieve a common goal: improving and promoting quality of life, health, and safety in the community.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is a well-known healthcare organization that advocates mainly for public health in the United States. The CDC is a government organization in the United States that is part of the Department of Health and Human Services with a principal mission to safeguard public health and safety (ASPA, 2020).
The agency strives to preserve the public health of US residents via its various initiatives and collaboration with many other local and worldwide programs and organizations. The goal of this paper is to describe how the CDC’s mission and vision enable it to contribute to public health and safety, to highlight how the agency advocates for equal opportunities, to demonstrate the impact of funding, policy, and regulations on service delivery, and to explain how the agency’s work impacts the health and safety needs of a local community.
How does the Organization’s Mission and Vision Enable it to Contribute to Public Health and Safety Improvements?
Mission and vision are two critical instruments for the success of every organization. While a mission statement clearly shows an organization’s purpose and its strategies to attain its goals, a vision is an eventual objective or where an organization sees itself in the near future (Malmivaara, 2020).
The CDC’s mission, to safeguard Americans from health, safety, and security concerns, is a critical steppingstone to the organization’s success or contribution to public health and safety (CC, 2022b). To accomplish its mission, the CDC prioritizes infectious diseases such as influenza and Covid19, non-communicable diseases such as obesity, hypertension, and smoking-related illnesses, establishing an antibiotic resistance laboratory network to combat the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and establishing surve
illance programs such as the Vaccine Adverse Reporting System (VAERS) to monitor vaccine safety (CDC, 2022b). The CDC’s initiatives seek to defend the community’s public health by protecting the population from diseases, injuries, and disabilities, as well as to increase their safety via programs such as safe vaccine development.
The CDC agency communicates a notion of what the world would be like if the agency’s aims were accomplished via a vision. The CDC’s vision is to create a healthy population in a healthy world by equitably protecting health, safety, and security (CDC, 2022b). To accomplish this vision, the CDC believes that prevention is the basis upon which its objectives may be realized, and consequently invests in infectious disease and non-communicable disease prevention, improving community health and safety.
Various local and worldwide initiatives support the CDC’s mission and vision of improving community health and safety. Locally, the Federal Select Agent Program assists the CDC in inspecting labs in the United States that operate with hazardous pathogens, therefore safeguarding the public from potentially lethal substances such as anthrax and the Ebola virus (Smith et al., 2018).
Furthermore, it collaborates with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to construct a nationwide vaccine safety monitoring program that will lead to the creation of safe vaccines (Meissner et al., 2018). Globally, the CDC collaborates with the World Health Organization (WHO) on a variety of projects, one of which is the implementation of the International Health Regulations (IHR) to prevent, contain, and report on disease outbreaks throughout the world (CDC, 2022a). These groups, whether local or global, support the CDC’s efforts to promote public health and community safety.
The Agency’s Ability to Promote Equal Opportunities and Improve the Quality of Life in the Community
While providing services to the public, healthcare organizations strive to promote equitable opportunities and limit any disparity or inequity that may arise in service delivery. The CDC makes significant strides in achieving health equity, which is defined as the state in which a person has the chance to reach their full health potential without being disadvantaged due to social status or other socially determined variables (Jensen et al., 2022).
Despite the agency’s attempts to attain health equality, health disparities or inequities associated with social, cultural, and physical factors may stymie the process. Racism and prejudice based on ethnicity and economic status are among the social determinants of health that hinder service delivery, whereas cultural impediments to service delivery include language differences (USDHHS, 2022). Physical constraints, including housing, safety, and access to healthcare services, can as well contribute to significant health inequalities.
To reduce the disparities and promote fair opportunities for everyone, the organization collaborates with other initiatives such as Healthy People 2030. For example, after discovering that Black and Hispanic children were hospitalized with asthma complications at a much higher rate than White children, the CDC, in collaboration with the Boston Children’s Hospital Community, empowered community health workers to work closely with the children to reduce the number of hospitalizations (Prather et al., 2020).
Furthermore, after recognizing that colorectal cancer disproportionately affects racial and ethnic minorities with low incomes in Alaska and Washington, the CDC developed cost-effective strategies to improve colorectal cancer screening in the two states, thereby eliminating health disparities caused by economic disadvantages (May et al., 2019).
Moreover, translators were often utilized to overcome cultural obstacles such as language difficulties, which were especially noticeable during the Covid19 contact tracing. In collaboration with other agencies, the CDC’s developed initiatives seek to remove healthcare disparities and inequities, promote equitable opportunities among its beneficiaries, and improve their quality of life.
The Impact of Funding Sources, Policy, and Legislation on CDC’s Service Delivery
Besides personnel, finance is another important aspect of running an organization. The availability and sufficiency of financial resources influence whether an agency is capable of launching and finishing initiatives. The CDC, being a government agency, is funded via the federal budget.
The agency received a total of $7.8 billion in 2021, with supplemental funds to expedite the response to Covid19 (Reid, 2021). The CDC efficiently utilized pandemic money to discover and characterize novel Covid19 variants, give vaccination information and recommendations, decrease health disparities, and educate the public about the deadly infectious illness.
Policies and regulations also have a substantial influence on the CDC’s capacity to provide services. For example, the CDC digital media privacy policy pledges to safeguard the personal identifiable information (PII) of anybody who accesses CDC websites (CDC, 2022c).
The following are the policy provisions: When you visit any of the CDC’s digital media platforms, any PII you supply is properly safeguarded, and non-PII information about your visit is automatically gathered but only temporarily retained (CDC, 2022c). The privacy policy has a beneficial influence on the community by assuring the safety and security of its members.
The capacity of the CDC to assure the safety and security of members’ PII is one of the reasons the agency has been around since antiquity, preserving its unshakable reputation as a government body mainly concerned with safeguarding public health and safety.
How does the Organization’s Work Impacts the Health and/or Safety Needs of a Local Community?
Recognizing the importance of unity in accomplishing health goals, the CDC agency established the Healthy Communities Program to support chronic disease prevention at the local level. The Healthy Communities Program promotes disease prevention via behavior modification. For example, visitors to one of Chicago’s 556 parks have access to vending machines that only sell healthy food (Lane, 2018).
This initiative was created to limit the consumption of unhealthy junk food, which contributes to rising obesity rates. Furthermore, over 90,000 Davenport, Lowa residents have enhanced access to physical exercise by repaving and expanding a 9-mile bike track and installing distance indicators (Whitsel et al., 2021). Such CDC-led activities at the local community level enhance the health of community people while lowering the risk of many chronic diseases.
Nurses, the majority of the healthcare staff, play an important role in fulfilling the agency’s goals. First, to become an employee of the CDC, a nurse or any other person with the necessary credentials applies and seeks to meet the standards. Once a person is verified as an employee, in this example, as a CDC nurse, they are deployed appropriately based on the duty they have been allocated.
Nurses may engage in various activities, including promoting dietary programs, physical activity interventions, and smoking-cessation campaigns. Furthermore, disease screening programs and the execution of infectious disease control programs such as public masking are CDC measures in which nurses are engaged.
Conclusion
Nurses encounter patients not just in clinical corridors but also in public health, administrative, advocacy, and policy sectors. As public health advocates, nurses commit to protecting the community’s health and safety while also improving their quality of life. To do this, nurses collaborate with other healthcare organizations, such as the CDC, a government agency established to safeguard public health and safety.
The CDC’s mission and vision give a sense of direction and a clear purpose, as well as methods for achieving the agency’s goals. In collaboration with various other organizations, both local and worldwide, and with effective financing and favorable rules and regulations, the CDC is on a lifetime mission to enhance community quality of life and public health and safety.
References
Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs (ASPA). (2020, October 27). Health and human services agencies and offices. Hhs.gov; US Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/about/agencies/hhs-agencies-and-offices/index.html
CDC. (2022a, July 25). International health regulations (IHR). Cdc.gov. https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/healthprotection/ghs/ihr/index.html
CDC. (2022b, September 20). Mission, role, and pledge. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/about/organization/mission.htm
CDC. (2022c, November 2). CDC digital media channel privacy policy notice. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/other/privacy.html
Jensen, N., Kelly, A. H., & Avendano, M. (2022). Health equity and health system strengthening – Time for a WHO re-think. Global Public Health, 17(3), 377–390. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2020.1867881
Lane, C. (2018). Exploring healthy vending contracts as a localized policy approach to improve the nutrition environment in publicly funded recreation facilities. https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/9236
Malmivaara, A. (2020). Vision and strategy for healthcare: Competence is a necessity. Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine: Official Journal of the UEMS European Board of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, 52(5), jrm00061. https://doi.org/10.2340/16501977-2684
May, F. P., Yano, E. M., Provenzale, D., Steers, W. N., & Washington, D. L. (2019). Race, poverty, and mental health drive colorectal cancer screening disparities in the Veterans Health Administration. Medical Care, 57(10), 773–780. https://doi.org/10.1097/MLR.0000000000001186
Meissner, H. C., Farizo, K., Pratt, D., Pickering, L. K., & Cohn, A. C. (2018). Understanding FDA-approved labeling and CDC recommendations for use of vaccines. Pediatrics, 142(3), e20180780. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-0780
Prather, S. L., Foronda, C. L., Kelley, C. N., Nadeau, C., & Prather, K. (2020). Barriers and facilitators of asthma management as experienced by African American caregivers of children with asthma: An integrative review. Journal of Pediatric Nursing, 55, 40–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pedn.2020.06.012
Reid, L. J. (2021). The economic effect of the CVOID-19 lockdown in the United States: Was the cure worse than the disease? SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3848723
Smith, J., Gangadharan, D., Hemphill, M., & Edwin, S. (2018). Review of requests to exclude attenuated strains of Select Agents and modified select toxins, division of Select Agents and toxins, Centers for Disease Control and prevention, 2003-2017. Health Security, 16(6), 402–409. https://doi.org/10.1089/hs.2018.0070
- S Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS). (2022). Social determinants of health. Health.gov. https://health.gov/healthypeople/priority-areas/social-determinants-health
Whitsel, L. P., Huneycutt, F., Anderson, D. R., Beck, A. M., Bryant, C., Bucklin, R. S., Carson, R. L., Escaron, A. L., Hopkins, J. M., Imboden, M. T., McDonough, C., Pronk, N. P., Wojcik, J. R., Zendell, A., & Ablah, E. (2021). Physical activity surveillance in the United States for work and commuting: Understanding the impact on population health and well-being: Understanding the impact on population health and well-being. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 63(12), 1037–1051. https://doi.org/10.1097/JOM.0000000000002305
Community Resources Paper Instructions
Research a selected local, national, or global nonprofit organization or government agency to determine how it contributes to public health and safety improvements, promotes equal opportunity, and improves the quality of life within the community. Submit your findings in a 3-5 page report.
As you begin to prepare this assessment, it would be an excellent choice to complete the Nonprofit Organizations and Community Health activity. Complete this activity to gain insight into promoting equal opportunity and improving the quality of life in a community. The information gained from completing this activity will help you succeed with the assessment.
Introduction
Many organizations work to better local and global communities’ quality of life and promote health and safety in times of crisis. As public health and safety advocates, nurses must be cognizant of how such organizations help certain populations. As change agents, nurses must be aware of factors that impact the organization and the services that it offers. Familiarity with these organizations enables the nurse to offer assistance as a volunteer and source of referral.
This assessment provides an opportunity for you gain insight into the mission, vision, and operations of a community services organization.
Preparation
You are interested in expanding your role as a nurse and are considering working in an area where you can help to promote equal opportunity and improve the quality of life within the local or global community. You are aware of several nonprofit organizations and government agencies whose work contributes to this effort in some way. You have particular interest in one of these organizations but would like to know more about its contributions to public health and safety improvements. You would like to report the results of your research in a scholarly paper that you could submit for publication.
Research a selected local, national, or global nonprofit organization or government agency from the list provided. Determine how the organization or agency contributes to public health and safety improvements, promotes equal opportunity, and improves the quality of life within the community. Submit your findings in a 3–5 page report.
As you begin to prepare this assessment, it would be an excellent choice to complete the Nonprofit Organizations and Community Health activity. Complete this activity to gain insight into promoting equal opportunity and improving the quality of life in a community. The information gained from completing this activity will help you succeed with the assessment.
Choose the organization or agency you are most interested in researching:
Instructions
Research a selected local, national, or global nonprofit organization or government agency from the list provided. Determine how the organization or agency contributes to public health and safety improvements, promotes equal opportunity, and improves the quality of life within the community. Submit your findings in a 3–5 page report.
As you begin to prepare this assessment, it would be an excellent choice to complete the Nonprofit Organizations and Community Health activity. Complete this activity to gain insight into promoting equal opportunity and improving the quality of life in a community. The information gained from completing this activity will help you succeed with the assessment. After completing this activity, choose an organization or agency from the list that you are most interested in researching.
Document Format and Length
Format your paper using APA style.
Supporting Evidence
Cite at least three credible sources from peer-reviewed journals or professional industry publications published within the past 5 years that support your research findings.
Graded Requirements
The research requirements, outlined below, correspond to the grading criteria in the assessment scoring guide, so be sure to address each point.
Additional Requirements
Before submitting your paper, proofread it to minimize errors that could distract readers and make it difficult for them to focus on your research findings.
Competencies Measured
By successfully completing this assessment, you will demonstrate your proficiency in the following course competencies and scoring guide criteria:
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
National Center for Transgender Equality.
National Resource Center on LGBT Aging.
Advocacy & Services for LGBT Elders.
National Alliance to End Homelessness.
The Arc: For People With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.
Alliance for Retired Americans.
Blue Campaign: What Is Human Trafficking?
A title page and references page. An abstract is not required.
Appropriate section headings.
Your paper should comprise 3–5 pages of content plus title and references pages.
Explain how the organization’s mission and vision enable it to contribute to public health and safety improvements.
Include examples of ways a local and/or global initiative supports organizational mission and vision and promotes public health and safety.
Evaluate an organization’s ability to promote equal opportunity and improve the quality of life in the community.
Consider the effects of social, cultural, economic, and physical barriers.
Assess the impact of funding sources, policy, and legislation on the organization’s provision of services.
Consider the potential implications of funding decisions, policy, and legislation for individuals, families, and aggregates within the community.
Explain how an organization’s work impacts the health and/or safety needs of a local community.
Consider how nurses might become involved with the organization.
Organize content so ideas flow logically with smooth transitions; contain few errors in grammar/punctuation, word choice, and spelling.
Apply APA formatting to in-text citations and references exhibiting nearly flawless adherence to APA format.
Write with a specific purpose and audience in mind.
Adhere to scholarly and disciplinary writing standards and APA formatting requirements.
Competency 1: Analyze health risks and health care needs among distinct populations.
Explain how an organization’s work impacts the health and/or safety needs of a local community.
Competency 2: Propose health promotion strategies to improve the health of populations.
Explain how an organization’s mission and vision enable it to contribute to public health and safety improvements.
Competency 3: Evaluate health policies, based on their ability to achieve desired outcomes.
Assess the impact of funding sources, policy, and legislation on an organization’s service delivery.
Competency 4: Integrate principles of social justice in community health interventions.
Evaluate an organization’s ability to promote equal opportunity and improve the quality of life in a community.
Competency 5: Apply professional, scholarly communication strategies to lead health promotion and improve population health.
Organize content so ideas flow logically with smooth transitions; contain few errors in grammar/punctuation, word choice, and spelling.
Apply APA formatting to in-text citations and references exhibiting nearly flawless adherence to APA format.
SCORING GUIDE
Use the scoring guide to understand how your assessment will be evaluated.
Please answer all questions under the Distinguished Column of the scoring guide.