Population: adult obesity in Kentucky. You will develop a project within a practice setting that allows you to develop these leadership skills.
You will develop a project within a practice setting that allows you to develop these leadership skills. You will identify a problem area in a practice setting that you specifically want to address (e.g., practice, policy, population, education) that aligns with organizational priorities.
You will focus on a real-life solution for the problem. You should choose a topic that is timely, manageable, and realistic to the current healthcare environment. As with all projects, you should think how you, as a nurse, function in the following roles: detective, scientist, and manager of the healing environment.
REQUIREMENTS
You must use the rubric to direct the creation of your submission because it provides detailed criteria that will be used to evaluate your work. Each requirement below may be evaluated by more than one rubric aspect. The rubric aspect titles may contain hyperlinks to relevant portions of the course.
Note: Any information that would be considered confidential, proprietary, or personal in nature should not be included. Do not include the actual names of people, stakeholders, or other personally identifiable information. Fictional names should be used. Also, agency-specific data, including financial information, should not be included but should be addressed in a general fashion as appropriate.
A. Develop a written proposal by doing the following:
1. Identify a problem or issue related to practice, policy, population, or education that aligns with the organizational priorities you seek to solve.
a. Explain the problem or issue, including why it is applicable to the area of practice you chose and the healthcare environment.
2. Discuss your investigation of the problem or issue.
a. Provide evidence to substantiate the problem or issue (e.g., organizational assessment, national source documents, evidence from a stakeholder).
3. Analyze the state of the situation using current data.
a. Analyze areas that might be contributing to the problem or issue.
4. Propose a solution or innovation for the problem or issue.
a. Justify your proposed solution or innovation based on the results of your investigation and analysis.
5. Recommend resources to implement your proposed solution or innovation. Include a cost-benefit analysis of your proposed solution or innovation.
6. Provide a timeline for implementation based on your proposal.
7. Discuss why each key stakeholder or partner is important for the implementation of the solution or innovation.
a. Summarize your engagement with the key stakeholders or partners, including the input and feedback you received.
b. Discuss how you intend to work with those key stakeholders or partners in order to achieve success.
8. Discuss how your proposed solution or innovation could be implemented, including how the implementation could be evaluated for success.
B. Explain how you fulfilled the following roles during your process of investigation and proposal development:
1. scientist
2. detective
3. manager of the healing environment
C. Acknowledge sources, using APA-formatted in-text citations and references, for content that is quoted, paraphrased, or summarized.
D. Demonstrate professional communication in the content and presentation of your submission.
Kentucky Health News
Kentucky adults just keep getting larger, reaching an all-time high for the number of obese adults in the state, ranking it fifth in the nation.
“As a society, as a whole, we’re not quite convinced yet what a major problem this is,” said Dr. Barbara Fleming-Phillips, an internist who helps run the weight management clinic at UK Healthcare‘s Barnstable Brown Diabetes Center.
Kentucky’s adult obesity rate in 2018 was 36.6 percent, according to an annual report by Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. That’s an increase of 6.7% , and 2.3 percentage points, from last year’s rate of 34.3%, eighth highest in the nation.
The report says Mississippi and West Virginia have the highest rates of adult obesity, at 39.5%, and Colorado the lowest at 23%.
That said, all the state rates could actually be higher, says the report, since their numbers are based on the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a continuous national poll; people self-report, and tend to over-report their height and under-report their weight. Obesity is calculated through body mass index, essentially a ratio of height to weight.
Supporting that theory, the national adult obesity rate is 39.6%, which comes from actual body measurements from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
The report for Kentucky shows that 68.5% adults in the state are either obese or overweight.
“Clearly things are going in the wrong direction in Kentucky just as they are in the rest of the country,” said Fleming-Phillips. “And it’s really a systemic, overall-society problem; it’s not just a matter of counseling individual people on weight loss, which we do with my job, but it’s a matter of looking at the entire system.”
Strategies to combat obesity
Fleming-Phillips said it will take a “multi-pronged approach” to tackle excessive weight in Kentucky and the nation. She said that from her clinical experience, the most important contributor to weight loss is the diet, but added that exercise is definitely a component.
Nutritional education is needed in childhood, but adults also need nutrition education that teaches them to choose “real foods” over convenient, processed foods, Fleming-Phillips said.
As for exercise, she said because we are such a sedentary society with sedentary jobs, exercise must become a habit early on in a person’s life; otherwise they will have to decide it is important.
Kentuckians don’t exercise much. The report says Kentucky ranks No. 1 in the share of adults who say they are physically inactive: 32.3%.
The state also recognizes the need to focus its obesity efforts on children. That’s because a child who is overweight when they start kindergarten is three times as likely to become obese by middle school compared to their peers, Christina Dettman, spokeswoman for the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, said in an e-mail.
For example, she said the State Physical Activity and Nutrition Program works to increase breastfeeding in birthing facilities, since studies show children who have been breast-fed are less likely to be obese. The program also works to implement healthy-food guidelines in work and community settings; to integrate nutrition and physical-activity standards into early-care and education systems; and to improve sidewalks, paths and bicycle routes throughout the state.
Dettman added that Kentucky has received a federal grant that can be used for evidence-based strategies at the local level to improve nutrition and physical activity. It will be allocated to 11 community health departments in Eastern and Western Kentucky. They include health departments in the Purchase District, Pennyrile District, Kentucky River District, the Cumberland Valley District, and Muhlenberg, Todd, Calloway, Christian, Pike, Floyd and Whitley counties. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the grant is for $856,326.
The report notes that obesity levels are closely tied to social and economic conditions, finding that those with lower incomes are at higher risk of being obese as are people of color.