Nurse Practitioners - Research Paper Example

Nurse practitioners are individuals who have the skills to provide individualized care and also offer better clinical services to the community in general. The purpose of this assignment is to find out how much nurse practitioners and more so family nurse can influence their local communities in order to achieve the healthy people goal 2020 (Buppert 2011).

The healthy people goal to be discussed is the overarching goal number two which aims at “achieving health equity, eliminating disparities and improving the health of all groups .” I chose this goal due to the fact that many individuals in society are discriminated against due to the fact that they have various forms of disabilities (Institute of Medicine 2011). These individuals in the community are hidden away from others because they are considered shame and therefore are not accorded the necessary health care they require.

Achieving this goal of according equity and eliminating disparities is necessary not only as a way of helping those individuals with disabilities access health care but also as a way to educate the community on the importance of treating such people with justice and not discriminate against them because they are individuals just like them (McKenzie et al. 2011).

In the community I come from, people with disabilities are treated like lepers in the old days. They are locked up from the moment they acquire the disability of whatever form. They are not even taken to hospitals to find out if they can get any assistance like being given prosthetics, wheelchairs, or even crutches.

These individuals are sometimes locked up in different houses (which are constructed like cells) because they are believed to be contagious and therefore shunned away. They are not given enough food, and sometimes none at all. The occasional food they are given is not nutritious at health and hence such individuals suffer from malnutrition and malnourishment on top of other health-related opportunistic diseases and infections like coughs.

The nurse practitioner is specifically trained to provide individual health care (Rimmer and Cross 2002). This skill comes in handy in the initial stage of the “project” where they carry out assessments of the individuals with disabilities within the community and the form of disability they are facing. It is also necessary after teaching the local community (during the monitoring and evaluation stage). This is because they will be able to move to those homes with such individuals and see if their treatment in relation to health has changed.