ACTIVITY 3

FACTORS AFFECTING HEALTH

OF THE COMMUNITY
SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS
SORIANO, Angelica Joan M.
BSN IIIA

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FACTORS
AFFECTING
HEALTH OF THE
COMMUNITY
SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS

1. ENVIRONMENTAL
FACTORS
2. SOCIO- ECONOMIC
FACTORS (SOCIAL AND
ECONOMIC)
3. POLITICAL FACTORS
4. BEHAVIORAL FACTORS

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ENVIRONMENTAL FACTOR
All organisms depend on their environments for energy and materials needed to sustain life:
clean air, potable water, nutritious food, and safe places to live. For most of human history, increases in
longevity were due to improved access to these necessities. Advances in agriculture, sanitation, water
treatment, and hygiene have had a far greater impact on human health than medical technology.
Although the environment sustains human life, it can also cause diseases. Lack of basic necessities is
a significant cause of human mortality. Environmental hazards increase the risk of cancer, heart
disease, asthma, and many other illnesses. These hazards can be physical, such as pollution, toxic
chemicals, and food contaminants, or they can be social, such as dangerous work, poor housing
conditions, urban sprawl, and poverty. Unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation and hygiene are
responsible for a variety of infectious diseases, such as schistosomiasis, diarrhea, cholera, meningitis,
and gastritis. In 2015, approximately 350,000 children under age 5 (mostly in the developing world)
died from diarrheal diseases related to unsafe drinking water, and approximately 1.8 billion people used
drinking water contaminated with feces. More than 2 billion people lacked access to basic sanitation.
Energy production and use helps sustain human life, but it can also pose hazards to human
health and the environment, such as air and water pollution, oil spills, and destruction of
habitats. For example, pesticides play an important role in increasing crop yields, but they can also
pose hazards to human health and the environment. Alternatives to pesticide use create trade-offs in
health. The extreme action of stopping all pesticide uses could significantly reduce agricultural
productivity, leading to food shortages and increased food prices, which would, in turn, increase
starvation in some parts of the world.

The menace of pollution, communicable diseases due to poor sanitation, poor garbage
disposal, smoking, utilization of pesticides. For example, air pollution, contaminated food, water
waste, health hazards and health risks which are inherent in urban/ rural milieu, noise and
radiation pollution are some of the major examples of environmental factors affecting the health of the
community.

Climate change is projected to impact sea level, patterns of infectious disease, air quality, and
the severity of natural disasters such as floods, droughts, and storms.

There are many new developments in science, technology, and industry that are bound to pose
benefits and risks to the environment and human health. These include nanotechnology, genetic
modification of plants and animals, antibiotic resistance, threats to food safety, and the growing
market for biofuels. Longstanding challenges persist, including the preservation of ecosystems and
endangered species and questions about animal experimentation. Many more developments will
emerge. 3
Critique & Action as a Student Nurse (Environmental Factors):

Relationships between human health and the environment raise many ethical, social, and legal
dilemmas by forcing people to choose among competing values. These considerations can be grouped
into the following categories. As a student nurse, people nowadays should learn how to MANAGE
BETWEEN THE BENEFITS AND THE RISKS OF A CERTAIN ACTIVITY: Many of the issues at the
intersection of health and the environment have to do with managing benefits and risks. Public health
authorities have opted to regulate the use of pesticides to enhance food production while minimizing
damage to the environment and human health. No issue demands greater care in balancing benefits
and risks than global warming. A significant percentage of global climate change is due to the human
production of greenhouse gases. Climate change is likely to cause tremendous harm to the
environment and human health, but taking steps to drastically reduce greenhouse gases could have
adverse consequences for global, national, and local economies, which would result in a general
decline in human health and health care. For example, greatly increasing taxes on fossil fuels would
encourage greater fuel efficiency and lower carbon dioxide emissions, but it would also increase the
price of transportation, which would lead to widespread inflation and reduced consumer spending
power. Preparedness for the environmental impact of natural disasters as well as disasters of
human origin includes planning for human health needs and the impact on public infrastructure, such as
water and roadways should be emphasized before and after a natura disaster happens.

To deal with the new developments in science, technology, and industry that are bound to pose
benefits and risks to the environment and human health in a responsible way, we must continue to
research the relationship between human health and the environment and hold fair and democratic
public deliberations, such as community forums, academic conferences, and legislative debates,
involving participants with diverse cultural, socioeconomic, philosophic, and scientific
perspectives.

SOCIO- ECONOMIC FACTORS (SOCIAL AND

ECONOMICAL)
Social and economic factors are not commonly considered when it comes to health, yet
strategies to improve these factors can have an even greater impact on health over time than those
traditionally associated with health improvement, such as strategies to improve health behaviors. Social
and economic factors, such as income, education, employment, community safety, and social supports
can significantly affect how well and how long we live. These factors affect our ability to make healthy
choices, afford medical care and housing, manage stress, and more. Families in lower income group
are the ones mostly served. For example, unemployment or underemployment, and lack of decent
housing may all have some effect on the optimum level of functioning. This is because, people from
lower income groups tend to have proportionately greater number of illnesses and health problems than
those in the higher income groups. However, the middle- and upper-income group have also very
pressing health problems such as drug abuse, and lifestyle diseases.

Across the nation, there are meaningful differences in social and economic opportunities for
residents in communities that have been cut off from investments or have experienced discrimination.
These gaps disproportionately affect people of color – especially children and youth.
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 In the Social & Economic Factors area of the County Health Rankings we look at:

1. Education
2. Employment - detailing unemployment statistics.
3. Income - looking at children in poverty and income inequality.
4. Family & Social Support - providing information on children in single-parent households and
access to social opportunities.
5. Community safety - measuring violent crime and injury deaths.

Critique & Action as a Student Nurse:

Emphasize the importance of managing benefits and risks of raising social justice
concerns. In general, people with lower socioeconomic status have greater exposure to certain
detrimental environmental conditions in their homes or at work, such as lead, mercury, pesticides, toxic
chemicals, or air and water pollution. Communities and nations should minimize such injustices when
making decisions such as choosing a site for a factory, a power plant, or waste dump, or regulating
safety in the workplace. The decision-making process should be fair, open, and democratic, so that
people who will be affected by environmental risks have a voice in these deliberations and can make
their concerns known. The first socioeconomic factor is employment. Your employment is your job.
What you do for a living. Your employment status and your particular occupation has a large impact on
your health. For example, people with physically active jobs, such as a laborer or a personal trainer are
more likely to complete the recommended 30 min a day, 5 days a week for vigorous physical activity.
However, a high-level executive who works long hours and sits at a desk all day is less likely to do
physical activity, is more likely to be stressed and have a poor social life. Education is another
socioeconomic factor that determines your health. Not only will education influence your choice of
employment, but your education will directly impact your health. Education does not just refer to your
level of education. That is, it does not just refer to whether you complete your HSC, go to University etc.
Your education and health can be specific. The final socioeconomic factor is income. Income will
dramatically influence and help determine your level of health. Income relates to the amount of money
coming into your bank account and often the more you earn the better your health can be. People with
higher levels of income can afford many of the health care services that are not completely covered by
Medicare. Those with a lower socioeconomic status are at higher risk of having poor health. They are
less educated, leading to poorer health choices; have less money leading to less health choice, and
often work in occupations that provide increased risks to health, such as the transport industry or
administrative roles.

POLITICAL FACTORS
Politics have power and authority to regulate the environment or social climate. For example,
laws or legislative acts are often related to promoting safety and people empowerment. Political
jurisdictions have the power and authority to regulate the environment. Examples are safety,
oppression, and people empowerment. Increase of crimes and the lack of safety in streets and
even in the homes are major concerns of society. Oppression especially of the poor, differential
treatment in various classes of society affects health. Policymakers should be aware that social
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democratic welfare state types, countries that spend more on public services, and countries with lower
income inequalities have better self-rated health and lower mortality. Some political factors that affect
the health of a healthy community are:

1. Government type and stability

2. Freedom of press, rule of law and levels of bureaucracy and
3. corruption
4. Regulation and de-regulation trends
5. Social and employment legislation
6. Tax policy, and trade and tariff controls
7. Environmental and consumer-protection legislation
8. Likely changes in the political environment

Critique & Action as a Student Nurse:

Various public health strategies pit the rights of individuals against the good of society, such as
mandatory treatment, vaccination, or diagnostic testing; isolation and quarantine; and disease
surveillance. The main argument for these public health strategies is that individual human rights may
have to be limited to prevent the transmission of infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, SARS,
HIV/AIDS, and pneumonia. But restrictions on rights should be well thought-out and safeguards put in
place to prevent public health authorities from overstepping their bounds. Protecting the public’s health
should not come at the expense of human rights. Human rights issues also come up in research on
environmental health that involves human subjects. For such research to be ethical, human subjects
must give consent, and great care must be taken to ensure that they understand that they can opt out
of the research project. As a student nurse, I would emphasize that an environmental regulation is
designed to protect average members of the population it may fail to adequately protect vulnerable
subpopulations. Justice demands that we take care of people who are vulnerable. However, almost
everyone in the population has an above-average susceptibility to at least one environmental risk
factor. Since providing extra protections to everyone would be costly and impractical, protections must
be meted out carefully and the populations who are vulnerable to a particular environmental risk factor
must be defined clearly. For example, about 0.4% of the U.S. population has a severe allergic reaction
to peanuts. Banning the sale of peanuts would be a costly and impractical way of protecting people with
peanut allergies, but requiring that products containing peanuts be labeled clearly would be reasonable.

BEHAVIORAL FACTORS
A person’s level of functioning is affected by certain habits that he/ she has. These may be in
the form of smoking, intake of alcoholic drinks, substance abuse, and lack of exercise. The people’s
lifestyle, health care and child rearing practices are shaped to a large extent by their culture and ethnic
heritage. Several behaviors that exert a strong influence on health are reviewed in this section:
tobacco use, alcohol consumption, physical activity and diet, sexual practices, and disease
screening. Although epidemiologic data on the relationships between these behaviors and various
health outcomes were available in the early 1980s, many refinements in knowledge have occurred
since then. Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are the leading causes of disease and death
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worldwide, and their symptoms and resulting functional limitations are related to impaired quality of life
(1–5). NCDs accounted for 57 million deaths in 2008, of which 63% were attributed to cardiovascular
disease, diabetes, cancer, and chronic respiratory disease. Numerous lifestyle habits, identified as
behavioral risk factors (BRFs), may increase NCD risk. These risk factors include overweight or
obesity, smoking, physical inactivity, and risky alcohol consumption. Each of these risk factors alone
can cause numerous health problems. For example, from 2008 to 2030 deaths attributed to smoking
worldwide are expected to double, from 3.4 to 6.8 million. Overweight and obesity, direct consequences
of physical inactivity and unhealthy diet, are responsible for 2.8 million deaths annually.

Critique & Action as a Student Nurse:

Health promotion is defined as “the process of enabling people to increase control over and to
improve their health”. Health promotion focuses on physical, mental and social well-being not merely
disease or infirmity in line with the definition of health in the WHO Constitution (1). Application of the
concept of health promotion and education requires actions on both risk behavior but also the risk
linked to living conditions of people. The more health literate people are the more they are able to
protect their health. Behavioral studies are necessary to understand the predisposition of
individuals towards certain risks factors and should be the basis for developing health promotion and
education interventions.

In addition to enhancing health literacy, it is important that individuals live in environments

conducive to health and that this healthy environment is supported by healthy public policies that
reduce exposure to risks.