• You should respond to your peers by extending, refuting/correcting, or adding additional nuance to their posts.
• All replies must be constructive and use literature where possible.

Elizabeth Varona-Martin

Introduction to Women’s Health

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), enacted on March 23, 2010, had three major primary goals; namely, give support to innovative methods of medical care delivery that are designed to lower health costs generally, make health insurance available to more individuals and affordably, and expanding the Medicaid program to cover adults with income below 138% of the federal poverty level (FPL) (Courtemanche et al., 2020).

ACA helps make prevention services accessible and affordable to all Americans by eliminating sharing costs for the services and requiring health plans that cover preventive services. According to this Act, preventive services which have strong evidence scientifically, benefits in heath must be covered, and patients are no longer charged on copayments, deductible, or coinsurance on these services (Courtemanche et al., 2020). Under the Act, preventive health care for women such as prenatal care, mammograms, cervical cancer screening, and other services are generally covered with no sharing of costs. ACA now provides yearly mammograms and well-woman visits, breastfeeding, and birth control support.

From a lifespan development viewpoint, growth and development do not stop in adolescence or childhood; they still progress throughout adulthood. Erikson’s psychosocial stages of growth and development can be built by theories that describe the transformations during adulthood. Levinson explains that humans alternate between stable periods and periods of change. According to Erikson, women in early adulthood are majorly involved in establishing intimate relationships and not feeling isolated from others or their peers (Alexandra et al., 2017). Intimacy for women in this age does not essentially encompass romance but involves caring about another individual and sharing an individual’s self without losing oneself. Studies and thorough observations have indicated that this “intimacy and isolation” development crisis is greatly affected by the “identity versus role confusion” adolescent crisis and how it was resolved (Newman &Newman, 2017). Women in this age are sometimes afraid of getting too close to anyone else and later losing their sense of being defined in terms of another person (Newman& Newman, 2017). The intimate relationships during early adulthood are challenging, especially when one is struggling with issues of identity. Women in early adulthood should be subjected to psychological intervention or treatment such as structured counseling, where the patient visits the counseling center for short counseling sessions. Also, the patient can be subjected to motivational enhancement in scenarios where the patient has self-identity issues.

Primary prevention on Women’s Health at Health Services involves physicians, caregivers, and nurses who provide prevention, diagnosis of diseases, and treatment services for conditions that are long-term and common illnesses that affect women of all ages. Primary prevention for women’s health includes maintaining a healthy diet, immunization against disease, and an exercise regime. On the other hand, Secondary Prevention on women’s health involves screening for disease identification in the earlier stages before signs and symptoms start to show, which is conducted through measures, for instance, blood pressure regular testing, and mammography (Alexandre et al., 2017). Secondary prevention on Women’s health can also be conducted by administering low doses of aspirins, maintaining a healthy diet, and maintaining an exercise program that helps prevent further strokes or heart attacks (Women preventive services, 2020). Tertiary prevention entails complications reduction, other dysfunction prevention, and long-term sequelae disease reduction, including dental, speech, and problems related to swallowing. For instance, tertiary prevention involves; stroke or cardiac rehabilitation programs, management programs for chronic diseases such as depression and diabetes.

References

Alexander, I. M., Johnson-Mallard, V., Kostas-Polston, E., Fogel, C. I., & Woods, N. F. (Eds.). (2017). Women’s Health Care in Advanced Practice Nursing. Springer Publishing Company.

Courtemanche, C., Marton, J., Ukert, B., Yelowitz, A., & Zapata, D. (2020). The impact of the Affordable Care Act on health care access and self?assessed health in the Trump Era (2017?2018). Health services research, 55, 841-850.

Newman, B. M., & Newman, P. R. (2017). Development through life: A psychosocial approach. Cengage Learning.

Women’s preventive services guidelines. (2020, October 29). The official website of the U.S. Health Resources & Services Administration. https://www.hrsa.gov/womens-guidelines/index.html (Links to an external site.)