Consider the Haitian medical mission videos that you have viewed in Modules 1-5 of this
course. As you reflect on this natural disaster 🙁 EARTHQUAKE THAT HAPPENED
2010)
- 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. - Under which phase of the disaster do the three proposed interventions fall? Explain why
you chose that phase. - With what people or agencies would you work in facilitating the proposed interventions
and why?
Please writer references must not be more than 1 year old.
Community health and epidemiology
The Haiti earthquake disaster caused great havoc and saw many people lose their lives.
This discussion focuses on the nursing interventions that could have been adopted to manage the
situation and the category or phase of the disaster.
The three nursing interventions levels are primary, secondary and tertiary. Primary
prevention levels aim at preventing injury, secondary prevention occurs after diagnosis of a
problem and aims at preventing long-term effects (Institute for Work & Health, 2013). While
tertiary prevention aims at managing complicated long-term health problems and maximizing
quality of life (Baisch, 2012). In the Haiti situation, the primary prevention nursing interventions
could have been educating the people on the need to avoid living in areas that are prone to
earthquakes. Secondary intervention was to ensure that people in those areas are evacuated to
avoid a reoccurrence of the same. Those succumbed to injuries would be required to adhere to
their medications to ensure that they stay healthy. Tertiary intervention is to establish patient
support groups that will be able to help the survivors to live positively with their conditions.
They can also come up with programs where earlier survivors make visits to the survivors to
encourage them.
COMMUNITY HEALTH AND EPIDEMIOLOGY 2
The phases of a disaster include; mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery
(Restore your Economy. org (2013). The three proposed interventions fall in the first phase-
mitigation. This is because the situation could have been avoided. Even though an earthquake is
a natural disaster, there were reports from the department that assess earthquake prone areas and
indicated that the area is prone to earthquake. Therefore, plans could have been made earlier to
ensure that, there were no causalities.
In ensuring that these interventions are provided, it requires participation of many
agencies, which include health personnel experts on issues of earthquakes, nongovernmental
organizations such as Red Cross to help in evacuation, corporate, families and the government.
COMMUNITY HEALTH AND EPIDEMIOLOGY 3
References
Baisch, M. (2012). A Systematic Method to Document Population-Level Nursing Interventions
in an Electronic Health System, Public Health Nursing, 29(4): 352-360.
Institute for Work & Health. (2013).What researchers mean by primary, secondary and tertiary
prevention.