Preventative Nursing During the Haitian Earthquake Disaster
When natural disasters strike affluent nations, such as the recent round of hurricanes to batter America's Eastern seaboard or the tsunami that inundated Japan in 2011, there are typically established healthcare delivery and preventative care systems in place to prevent the spread of disease among those who have been victimized. While property may be razed to rubble, and casualties will inevitably occur during the disaster's impact, the nursing infrastructure within industrialized nations is enough to prevent the pervasive, epidemic-like conditions capable of claiming untold thousands of additional lives. For so-called "third-world" nations, however, the arrival of nature's fury is often only just the beginning of a prolonged period of misery and suffering. In Haiti for example, where a massive earthquake leveled entire communities in 2010, masses of displaced victims have been forced to seek shelter in squalid refugee camps that, without the presence of qualified, competent nursing care, have since devolved into virulent breeding grounds for deadly illnesses like cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and shigellosis (Romero, 2010). In addition to the scourge of preventable diseases spreading due to a lack of nursing...
By answering the following three questions regarding the role of primary nursing care within a declared disaster zone, a greater appreciation for the importance of administering preventative healthcare to a population that has recently been ravaged by the random fury of nature's power.
1.) Propose one example of a nursing intervention related to the disaster from each of the following levels: primary prevention, secondary prevention, and tertiary prevention. Provide innovative examples that have not been discussed by a previous student.
2.) Under which phase of the disaster do the three proposed interventions fall? Explain why you chose that phase.
To ensure that primary preventative care is provided throughout Haiti's refugee population, it is important to consider that most "American and Haitian public health specialists there consider the diseases stemming from the buildup of human waste in the camps as possibly the most pressing health threat"…
