My name is Istan and this is my first entry for the Community Health Nursing class.

My clinical section is in Masaryk Towers, a group of buildings on the lower east side of Manhattan. I was told that the community here is comprised of people who were marginalized in other places and found a home here. It definitely looks like a hell of a place to settle down – lowers east side is a great neighborhood, but I am sure that was not the case when this was started.

So far we spend a lot of time discussing cultural competency and what we will do and not a whole lot of doing what we actually can do. That’s the unfortunate reality when you deal with a community clinical – we don’t have assigned patients and people aren’t exactly flocking to us. Still, we make do with the people that come up to us and do simple assessments and answer questions. Aside from the blood pressures/ glucose checks we do a lot of teaching. It’s easy to forget how much an average person does not know. A lady came up to me asking for a sugar check because the last time she took it, it was elevated. She was not a diabetic and had no idea what hgba1c was or what her level was. I asked her if she was fasting before she checked her sugar last time and she had no idea that it was necessary. This made me realize that while we try to be therapeutic we can intimidate some of our patients because they are not exactly understanding of what our brief assessments are. I probed more and asked if she could bring me her last CBC and CMP levels and realized that on top of not knowing what that meant she did not keep a personal health record.

My goal for this semester is to promote the clients in this community to establish and maintain a personal health record because that will make them more involved in their health care and certainly build up their confidence and understanding of our role in maintaining their health.