Assignment: Illness Prevention-Based Education

Diversity among individuals, as well as cultures, provides a challenge for nurses when it comes to delivering meaningful health promotion and illness prevention-based education. How do teaching principles, varied learning styles (for both nurses and patients), and teaching methodologies impact the approach to education? How do health care providers overcome differing points of view regarding health promotion and disease prevention? Provide an example.Catholic bishops in Latin America convened in Medellín (1968) and in Puebla (1978) to “denounce the political and economic forces that immiserate so many Latin Americans” (Farmer 2005 p. 141). The resulting “Puebla document” identified structural forces that allow the “rich [to] get richer at the expense of the poor, who get even poorer” (ibid.) (Boff and Boff 1987; Farmer 2005) as the underlying root of social inequality. This is the primary tenet of a structural violence lens. Academic conceptualization of institutionalized inequality as “structural violence” was originally developed in Gultang’s (1969) seminal essay Violence, Peace, and Peace Research where he identified as violent, processes, actions or causes that result in certain individuals being unable to live according to their own innate skill and capacity– for their actual lifetime “realizations” to be “below their potential realizations” (Galtung 1969, p. 168). When power relations (e.g., class, gender, race), and social institutions (e.g., family, ethnicity, religion) systematically perpetrate and reproduce a lack of actualized potential for some individuals while expanding the actualized potential of others (often beyond that suggested by their own innate skill and capacity), the “violence” becomes ensconced in people’s everyday lives as disparity. Although disparity can take many forms, health disparities can be understood as one of the most concrete manifestations of inequity, often determining who will live and who will die—with the poor and immigrants suffering disproportionately. In this context, Farmer, et al. (2006) explain that these dynamics “are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people (typically, not those responsible for perpetuating such inequalities)” (p. 1686).