Health Assessment on a Child and Youth Patient

Do the following for the two provided patient risk assessments:
• Share additional interview and communication techniques that could be effective with your the selected patient.
• Suggest additional health-related risks that might be considered.
• Validate an idea with your own experience and additional research.
Assessment one:
Patient profile: 4-year-old biracial male living with his grandmother in a high-density public housing complex.
Building a health history for the 4-year-old male will depend heavily on communication with his grandmother. If the child had not lived with his grandmother for his whole life and she is unaware of parts of his health history, a social worker who may have been part of his care can be questioned or previous medical records can be researched. The provider may also gain information from the child by physically moving down to their level and using language they will understand to encourage them to actively participate in the interview. Using props, such as dolls, can help the child communicate where they experience pain (Damm, Leiss, Habeler, & Ehrich, 2015). Understand that there may be difficulty social circumstances that have led the child to live with his grandmother.
Building a health history for the 4-year-old living in a high-density public housing complex will take some special consideration. Many high-density public housing areas are very disparate and are associated with lower incomes, higher number of risky behaviors in the general environment, and cultural and historical patterns that are linked a higher morbidity and mortality (Swift, 2012). Questions related to this disparity should target the child’s safety and health status. Questions that identify immunizations, usual diet and access to food, exposure to firearms or drugs, number of other people living at home, insurance coverage and access to care will be important to ask in a sensitive manner.
An appropriate risk assessment tool to use with the 4-year-old male would be the Well-Child Care Toolkit. This toolkit assesses a number of areas such as anemia, developmental and behavioral risks, growth, hearing, vision, nutrition and oral health (brightfutures, 2020). Using this toolkit can assist in identifying a child at risk as well as develop a baseline for future assessments.
Assessment 2:
Patient Profile: 26-year-old Lebanese female living in graduate-student housing.
When initially meeting the patient, I would knock on the door prior to entering, introduce myself in a conversational tone and make eye contact to help the patient relax and to be more willing to share responses to open-ended questions. (Ball, Dains, Flynn, Solomon, & Stewart, 2019). After identifying myself I would use patient-centered questions like, “How would you prefer to be addressed?” This would show the patient they are respected by the provider. For the Lebanese female, it would be important to ask, “What is your primary oral and written language?” This would identify if a translator is necessary (Sullivan, 2019). It would also allow the patient to clarify if she prefers to speak in English or another language. Another question I would ask is, “What are you concerned with that you would like for us to focus on today?” Understanding primary concerns, trusting the patient, and attempting to deal with the issue, enhances the provider’s ability to meet the needs of the patient. This question will also support the provider and patient to collaboratively create an area of focus. Together these questions would support effective communication with politeness, clarity, and connection (Ball et al., 2019).
I would use communication techniques to ensure comfort, connection, and confirmation. For the patient’s comfort, I would provide physical comfort such as a comfortable temperature, maintain privacy by having the curtains closed, and sitting a comfortable distance apart. As a young adult, it would be beneficial to avoid having a table or desk in between the provider and the patient. For connection, I would maintain comfortable eye contact according to the patient’s preference and culture, allow for silence, listen attentively, and ask open-ended questions to connect with the patient. For confirmation, I would ask to review a summary of the discussion and ask if there is anything else that you feel would be beneficial for me to know (Ball et al., 2019).
Risk Assessment and Target Questions
An applicable risk assessment to consider for a 26-year-old Lebanese female living in graduate-student housing is the risk for alcohol abuse. Being 26-years-old, the patient can buy and consume alcohol, as well as become socially influenced to drink alcohol, especially since she is living in graduate student housing. Together, her age and environment increase the risk of alcohol abuse. One questionnaire model reviews alcohol by the need to cut down, annoyance from being criticized, the feeling of guilt, and recognizing eye-openers. This is the CAGE Questionnaire, which consists of four questions to monitor for alcoholism. CRAFFT is another acronym for the screening of alcohol which stands for car, relax, alone, forget, friends, and trouble (Ball et al., 2019). A third screening tool for alcoholism is alcohol use disorders identification test, AUDIT (Indutnyy, Novikov, Samuseva, & Tagakov, 2019). The CRAFFT and CAGE questionnaires revealed and increased prevalence of the risk of alcohol abuse by graduate-level education participants over mid-level education students. The CRAFFT questionnaire is the most effective when assessing the risk of alcohol abuse in young adults in comparison to the CAGE and AUDIT (Indutnyy et al., 2019).