How Low-Income Affects Child Development Health and Education
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How Low-Income Affects Child Development, Health, and Education
Families and children growing up in low income or poor households encounter many challenges. These disadvantages negatively impact child development and lead to unavoidable social consequences such as poor education, health problems, and disparities. Low-income communities lack the money to access quality care, education, and other socioeconomic basics. Due to the nursing profession’s emphasis on caring relationships, nurses are the best-equipped health care providers who can lead the way in reducing health disparities. Therefore, it is significant for nurses to understand the social determinants of health at the community, individual, and population level. Treatments intervention works differently for patients from different social backgrounds. Patients from low-income households may lack the resources or the literacy to continue recommended home-based care, which affects their health outcomes (Dyk et al., 2018). Therefore, nurses understanding their clients’ social issues can help facilitate good health outcomes by offering well-evaluated interventions, providing education, and advocating for patients where necessary.
Like any other economically challenged patient worldwide, Canadians from poor households experience the struggles of healthcare affordability. Despite the government enacting the Affordable Care Acts, which enable patients to cost-share with insurance, health care delivery still include out-of pocket payments for some services like testing and consultation (Dyk et al., 2018). Among Canadians, people live way below the poverty line, which means even those cheap health fees are unaffordable. Sometimes, they have to forego seeking healthcare services. Some Canadian citizens settle for painful health conditions due to their lack of money to afford all the healthcare delivery fees.
Another challenge encountered by low-income clients is poor experience with health care professionals. Patients come from diverse backgrounds with different development experiences. Clients from poor households may have poor education, which affects their literacy with medication and medicine ( Dyk et al., 2018). Also, clients from such homes are likely to be more vulnerable to complicated health conditions. Therefore, providers need to understand the social issues surrounding their patients before administering any care. However, physicians do not usually consider this fact. Most of the time, physicians analyze their patients’ scenarios on an overall basis and are reluctant to listen to patients’ concerns. Hence, low-income patients in Canada have reported unsatisfying experiences with clinicians due to a lack of social background understanding.
Nurses also face particular challenges while dealing with low-income patients, such as psychological traumas, making patients challenging to talk to and challenging for nurses to make a diagnosis. Nurses spend more time interacting with patients, making them the best professionals to advocate for the clients. However, patients from low-income families and communities cannot be good communicators due to their stressful childhood development environments (Wei & Feeny, 2019). When a nurse encounters a patient with psychological trauma, dealing with them is challenging and requires unique expertise and patience.
Low literacy is also another challenge that nurses face while dealing with low-income patient population. With the emergency of patient-centered care in many facilities, patients must be active participants of the treatment process. However, a patient coming from an economically challenged family, due to the social disparities they encounter growing up, may attain little education (Wei & Feeny, 2019). With low literacy, it is hard for patients to understand medical procedures and give their opinions where required. Therefore, nurses dealing with this kind of clients they have difficulties trying to help patients while maintaining boundaries to avoid overstepping or violating the patient’s rights.
Nurses can address these challenges by inquiring about patients’ social challenges in sensitive and culturally acceptable ways. With technology gracing our world, a growing number of clinical tools can assist frontline physicians such as nurses in getting their clients to talk about issues such as lack of employment, food security, literacy level, and many others. Enquiring about these issues in a caring way, it’s essential in its own way. Empathy and compassion help the patient to feel accommodated and results in a patient opening up genuinely. Making the patient more comfortable talking about their concerns and symptoms and yield accurate diagnoses for physicians generally leads to quality care. Also, integrating social challenges information in medical records can be highly helpful to the entire health care team because it helps develop the best treatment interventions even in the future (Cook et al., 2018). The patient medical history can be used to make future treatments concerning the patient.
Canadian nurses can also play a role in addressing low-income patients’ problems by helping them access support services and benefits. In addition to making a social diagnosis, nurses can offer their clients social prescribing by referring them to social support services within and beyond the facilities. Some of these referrals could include employment agencies, women’s support groups, and substance use recovery groups, among other benefits. Referring patients to community-based support groups could reduce patients’ anxiety about their health and improve the overall perception of healthcare quality.
In addition to referrals, nurses and other physicians can also address the social disparities experienced by low-income patients by advocating for them. These professionals can advocate for their clients through writing letters to educational institutions, courts, and housing agencies. Nurses can also help their clients access other benefits like low-cost-day-care, school readiness programs, and child and family benefits. Nurses can ask their patients for social challenges screening tests during well-visits and a list of local support services to make good referrals and enable them access benefits even beyond healthcare facilities (Ylitalo et al., 2018). This action could improve patient’s resilience and improve trust in patient-physician interactions, which automatically will enhance the perception of safety and quality care delivery.
In conclusion, children growing up in economically disadvantaged families and communities experience several social inequities, including lack of access to quality education and healthcare. As nurses struggle to provide an accurate diagnosis, it is relevant for them to understand their social challenges. Low-income patients encounter challenges such as affordability and unsatisfactory experience with physicians. Patients forego seeking care due to the issue of high medical fees. When patients deal with physicians who overlook or fail to dig deep into their social status, they sometimes receive unsatisfying health services. Nurses dealing with low-income clients have to encounter the issue of low literacy, psychological traumas, and barriers to making appointments. Nurses being the best-equipped clinicians in developing caring relationships, they can address the issue of these challenges by playing the role of an advocate. Nurses can also help reduce these challenges by performing social challenges screening and offering referrals to patients who come from low-income families and communities.
References
Cook, P. F., Aagaard, L., Bowler, F., Rosenthal, L., Avery, L. K., & Weber, M. (2018). Screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment: nurses helping colorado training program. Journal of Nursing Education, 57(8), 476-482.
Dyk, P. H., Radunovich, H., & Sano, Y. (2018). Health Challenges Faced by Rural, Low-Income Families: Insights into Health Disparities. Family Science Review, 22(1), 54-69.
Wei, L., & Feeny, D. (2019). The dynamics of the gradient between child’s health and family income: Evidence from Canada. Social Science & Medicine, 226, 182-189.
Ylitalo, K. R., Meyer, M. R. U., Lanning, B. A., During, C., Laschober, R., & Griggs, J. O. (2018). Simple screening tools to identify limited health literacy in a low-income patient population. Medicine, 97(10).