Community Health Improvement Plan Paper

Since the primary goal of public health nursing is promoting health and preventing disease within the community, it’s essential that nurses be able to gather and assess demographic information to diagnose the local needs of the population and consider that information when developing a health improvement plan (Nies & McEwan, 2015). The assignment this week is to gather statistics from county, state and national databases and analyze the findings to identify actual or potential areas of concern.
It was sobering to compare the Franklin County health information to state and national statistics. Almost all of the demographic information highlights that our community is less healthy when compared to the state as a whole and the nation. This was surprising to me because the population of Franklin County is more educated and white-collar than other areas of the state. For this paper I will discuss the community problems of infant mortality, obesity, mental illness and chronic disease.
The most disturbing county statistic that I found and one that warrants the most attention is rate of infant mortality. Compared with other communities, this statistic is one of the highest in the nation. On average three families each week experience an infant death with the rate of black babies dying at twice the rate of white babies (Wexner Medical Center, n.d.).

Heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer are the leading cause of death throughout the country. Seventy-five percent of our nation’s health care spending will be used to care for patients with chronic ailments and in our county sixty percent of the deaths are attributed to chronic illness. Our local population has a higher rate of both youth and adults who suffer with asthma when compared to state and national rates. Diabetes and obesity rates are also higher than the national average (Wexner Medical Center,