Nurse Practitioner’s Role for Promoting Health and Preventing Adverse Birth Outcomes among Pregnant Women with Iron Deficiency Anemia in Urban Community

Abstract

Nurse practitioners play the important roles in the proactive primary health care service with a multidisciplinary team to promote health for all. Additionally, nurse practitioner’s performances cover all of four dimensions including health promotion, health protection, disease prevention, and primary treatment. Thailand Nursing and Midwifery Council (2008) recommended that the nurse practitioners must be provided by the special knowledge of primary medical care and immunization. There are five essential roles of nurse practitioner comprising 1) physical examination, 2) primary medical care and the referral complex case to hospitalization for appropriate treatment, 3) health promotion, 4) disease preventions and basic requirement of vaccination, and 5) empowerment for improving self-care abilities and recovering among patients based on their family context. These also cover all high risk groups such as aging people, children, and pregnant women. Especially, the highest risk of adverse birth outcomes is pregnant women with iron deficiency anemia in urban community. Moreover, strong evidences based have shown that most of them have inappropriate dietary consumption and insufficient taking iron supplementary behaviors, negative attitude about iron supplementation, and lack of family support. Thus, they can increase the risk of adverse birth outcomes including intrauterine growth restriction, preterm birth, and low birth weight. Apparently, these children will produce non-communicable disease in adult’s life such as diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and coronary heart disease. Therefore, the nurse practitioners have essential roles to promote health among pregnant women with iron deficiency anemia in urban community for preventing adverse birth outcomes based on the family’s context in Thailand 4.0.