N 493 Aspen University Professional Partnership Discussion
Discuss the factors and approach you will use to develop a professional partnership with your selected site.
Identifying my basic principles and care goals would be the first thing I would take before entering any professional engagement. Before we collaborate on a project, I’d like to make sure we share some of the same beliefs and aims. While specific variances are necessary for the most significant outcome and a holistic picture of the project, I feel that critical foundational beliefs and morals must be similar.
I would explain to the selected site that I wanted to partner with and that my goal was to promote better health in our community and help with health inequities in our neighborhood. After meeting with them and ascertaining if they shared my enthusiasm for the project, it would be time to devise a plan and strategy for completing it.
What is the importance of collaborating with other healthcare professionals to establish trusting relationships to gain commitment for mobilizing health initiatives?
It is critical to acknowledge that healthcare is a complicated topic with rapidly changing perspectives and technologies; as we move forward, physicians and doctors from many specialties must collaborate to deliver the finest, most specialized, and tailored treatment possible to patients. With chronic and acute diseases spreading like wildfire in today’s world, every patient will require a team of providers to achieve the best possible outcome.
It might be challenging to give reciprocal respect to others at work without feeling threatened or inferior if you believe someone is more brilliant or educated than you. As partnerships and collaboration become more common in healthcare, it will be critical to accept and appreciate one another as individuals working toward the same goal.
We all entered into healthcare to improve people’s health and general quality of life. We like studying and teaching and creating a positive impact on the world. I occasionally sense insecurities within myself. I make sure that cooperation and teamwork are functioning correctly.
Classmate post#2
My chosen site, the Tserha Ariam Kidist Silasse (TAKS) is an Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota that serves as a cultural and community center for the neighboring Ethiopian and East African communities across the city. Many older adults who immigrated to the city from Africa make up the members of this church community.
African American older adults living in the United States face major health disparities that lead to shortening their life expectancies and other chronic health conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, mental impairment, and more (Dilwerth et al., 2017). Reflective of this fact, many older adults in the TAKS community live with chronic health conditions and similar symptoms. They also face many challenges in coping with their chronic health problems effectively. The community’s older adults often struggle with juggling multiple treatments while maintaining a healthy quality of life, and usually go on without support from healthcare professionals. Due to their backgrounds and the environments they live in, these individuals tend to give minimal attention to their ongoing health conditions while attempting to navigate through other stressors. Older adults with chronic illness can also have difficulties in understanding their medical conditions, though they initially show interest in learning how to manage their care. So with the additional barriers of language and cultural differences, the struggle of understanding care plans and more becomes even more stressful for these adults. Providing clear and understandable information based on patients’ cultural, social, and intellectual abilities is essential for health promotion among these community members (Wiggins, 2012).
Seeing many of my community’s elders deal with these issues made me interested in focusing on this site and topic for my project. I chose TAKS as my community site in order to address the needs of these older adults and support their education and engagement. As a member of TAKS myself, I observe many of these patients and it seems like some additional resources and guidance to handle their chronic illnesses and improve their overall wellbeing would be beneficial to this group. Often during church services on Sunday mornings, older adults and other members will take the opportunity to visit the health office with questions or for services. Observing this interest from this age group in improving quality of life, it seems that a project might help return agency to these older adults. While I do not have a specific date outlined for my project it will likely take place in mid to late July.
