Friday

After having three days in the Cherokee Health Care System I have learned so much about culture. Everything that we have seen was not what I have expected. I can't believe how much I have actually learned. I thought that the most critical issue that this culture encounters daily is the fact that they all have suffer with some sort of drug or alcohol addiction. There are many prevalent conditions that I have noted in this culture such as diabetes and obesity. These conditions may become the most costly and preventable of all health problems. Diabetes and obesity may be related to genetics, culture or deficient knowledge with their health maintenance. When having a family history of type 2 Diabetes, it may be very difficult to figure out if your diabetes is due to lifestyle factors or genetic susceptibility. However, most of the time I have found that it is a mixture of both, genetics and lifestyle factors. The nurses role in health promotion and health maintenance is evolved around education. Education to the patients allows the nurses to help people; providing nurses the skills and tools they need to positively impact individuals lives. In my opinion and observation the center of the health care system revolves around the nurses and the interdisciplinary team. I thought that this was the center because they are the driving force to keep the health care team going. Today, their was a nurse in the emergency room that I had a great conversation with. He expressed how the team that worked in the Cherokee hospital worked great together and in the long run allowed the patients to be taken care of fast, efficiently and toward the best quality of care. I feel that this is much different than the previous experiences in health care outside of Cherokee. For example, I have never seen teams work so well with each other than I have today in the emergency room. The nurse explained to us that the faster they got the labs, urine samples and everything ordered and sent off to the lab the faster they could open up the bed for another patient, that could be worse off.