Adolescent Pregnancy Care Plan, Essay Example

Developing a care plan for adolescent pregnancy is necessary in St. Petersburg, FL because it is important for pregnant youth to understand that their life is not over simply because they have become pregnant. Due to the widespread prevalence of adolescent pregnancies in this region, it is important to create education programs to help these patients understand the risks involved in their pregnancy in addition to how these risks could be minimized. Since a lack of education is one of the primary issues linked to the incidence of adolescent pregnancy, it is important for these individuals to be aware of pregnancy risks to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the future. Furthermore, it is important for these individuals to understand how to care for their children in order to ensure that their health needs are sufficiently supported and that they are aware of the health resources available to them (Health Research Funding.org, 2014).

Applied Mobilize, Assess, Plan, Implement, Track (MAP-IT)

It is important for nurses that participate in this intervention program to partner with local institutions in order to ensure widespread access to this education program. Therefore, an ideal partner would be public schools in the St. Petersburg area to ensure that all students that need access to a safe sex program have access to it. In addition, individuals that do become pregnant and are attending school can be provided with counseling services to ensure that they are aware of their plan for giving birth to their child in addition to the social service supports they are able to receive to help them provide care for the child (Faber, 2015).

To assess the needs for these services, public schools can also be used. Ten middle schools and ten junior high schools can be surveyed to determine the amount of pregnant adolescents that attend their programs. This will allow this initiative to gain a greater understanding of the extent of this problem in the area. Furthermore, this information could act as baseline information to serve as a point of comparison for improvement in the area. Concrete measurements that could be used to track the success of the program is the number of pregnant adolescents in these areas over time in addition to an assessment of their overall knowledge as it pertains to the resources available for them.

The actual intervention program will consist of a partnership between local hospitals and schools to provide enhanced health education to women of reproductive age. This will include professional development training being provided to health teachers to begin introducing material that would lower the risk of pregnancy in the classroom in addition to inviting nurses to speak at the school about these issues and to answer any questions that students may have and not feel comfortable discussing with their teachers. In addition, weekly counseling services will be provided for students that are pregnant in an attempt to allow them to remain in school and feel prepared to give birth and take care of their children after the child is born. A constant flow of service provision will ensure that questions that these individuals have will be answered and their needs will be met over a long period of time. It is expected that not only will this type of program prevent adolescent pregnancies, it will also improve the health of the expecting mother and child as a result.

Identified priority nursing diagnosis

One of the highest risks associated with adolescent pregnancy is the possibility that individuals will become pregnant once again after experiencing a pregnancy for the first time (Stanhope & Lancaster, 2012). This is risky because many of these individuals come from a low socioeconomic background and have a challenging time balancing care for their child with the need to attend school or work to ensure care. Therefore, nurses are best able to enact pregnancy prevention programs to ensure that adolescent mothers are able to focus on their care of their child and prevent them from engaging in future risky behavior that will contribute to more unintended births.

Identified appropriate strategies to address nursing diagnosis and identified risks of aggregate

The most simplistic way to identify the risks of the aggregate is to determine which areas have the most economic difficulties. In addition, it is important to identify which areas already have a high incidence of adolescent pregnancy because research indicates that areas in which this problem already exists are more likely to experience continued patterns of this kind. Therefore, nurses must rely primarily on epidemiological knowledge to gain an understanding of the health and social trends that contribute to adolescent pregnancy. Overall, this data could be used to serve as a sufficient indicator of which neighborhoods have the greatest need for assistance, and it is imperative for nurses to provide this assistance accordingly.

Created a disaster management plan with at least two disasters addressed following the assignment criteria

A disaster management plan is primarily relevant when adolescents become pregnant for a second time. At this point, it is important for these individuals to receive a focus on the education necessary to prevent this risk of future pregnancies. Furthermore, since these individuals are also at higher risk for sexually transmitted diseases and other consequences of their sexual behaviors, it is important to provide them with independent counseling at a more frequent interval to also ensure that they are able to support the health of their first and second child.

An additional intervention that may need to be necessary is the provision of free birth control at the public school partners. If adolescents have access to safe sex, they are less likely to engage in risky sex. Since there is a high incidence of sexually transmitted disease and adolescent pregnancy among these populations, it is apparent that the best way to prevent these two difficulties is by providing these individuals with the tools they need to make these behaviors safe. When the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases rise, they tend to do so exponentially due to the greater number of individuals that are exposed to the disease and therefore have the opportunity to pass it to someone else. It is therefore important for these teenagers to be provided with the tools they need to have safe sex because this will significantly reduce the rate of adolescent pregnancy in addition to the rate of sexually transmitted diseases among this age group in these communities.

Overall, it is essential to take action to prevent this pertinent problem because the only effective deterrence is education and resources. Nursing interventions can be designed to provide both and partnering with schools will ensure that workers for these programs have direct access to the communities that need help the most.

References

Faber, S. (2015). Pros and Cons of Teenage Parenting. Retrieved from http://www.livestrong.com/article/562347-pros-and-cons-of-teenage-parenting/

Health Research Funding.org (2014). Pros and Cons of Teenage Pregnancy. Retrieved from http://healthresearchfunding.org/pros-cons-teenage-pregnancy/

Stanhope, M. & Lancaster, J. (2012). Public Health Nursing: Population-Centered Health Care in the Community, 8th Ed. Appendix E. Elsevier. Mosby. MI