Stress Management: An outreach PH intervention

Last semester’s teaching learning project involved educating the community on stress management. A great public health (PH) intervention I chose to discuss for this project is outreach. According to the Community/Public Health Nursing text, outreach “locates populations of interest or populations at risk and provides information about the nature of the concern, what can be done about it, and how services can be obtained” (Nies & McEwen, 2011). Stress management fits into an outreach intervention because stress is a problem factored into many health recovery and preventative measure populations.  

In order to implement this PH intervention it is important to identify the populations at high risk for stress. Stress can go on unnoticed by individuals. Those who feel the weight of everyday living as an overwhelming demand need to address their situation as being a stressor and understand that it is manageable. After assessing the need for stress management among populations, it is important to reach out to those populations and develop a way to spread awareness of stress, ways it can be managed, and the public services available to assist in that management.

An example population I found rather interesting involved stresses of parenting in mothers and how those stresses went in hand with symptoms of depression. In the article, Heneghan, Mercer, and DeLeone (2004) stated mothers felt parenting was “stressful”, “consuming”, and “overwhelming”. The outreach intervention that was conducted in this article involved mothers confiding in their child’s pediatrician about the stresses put on them while trying to raise a family. It was the responsibility then for the pediatrician to refer mothers with a certain level of depressive symptoms to adult healthcare providers for treatment. If looked at from a public health nurse (PHN) perspective, mothers found that having a good support system helped them feel less stressed and therefore made them less inclined to have depressive thoughts (Heneghan, 2004). Further out reach on stress management by spreading awareness and developing supportive services, could promote mental health and reduce incidences of depression.     

      

Heneghan, A., Mercer, M., & DeLeone, N. (2004). Will mothers discuss parenting stress and    depressive symptoms with their child's pediatrician?. Pediatrics, 113(3 Part 1), 460-467.

Nies, M.S. & McEwen, M. (2011). Community/public health nursing: promoting the health of populations (5^th ed.) St. Louis, MO: Saunders/Elsevier.