Two public health nurses plan to walk under a downtown bridge where various homeless persons live to assess their needs. Which of the following public health core functions is being used?
Policy development
Assurance
Primary prevention
Assessment
The Correct Answer is D
Choice A reason: Policy development involves creating guidelines, like sanitation laws, to improve health systemically. It’s proactive but not the direct action here. Assessing homeless needs under a bridge focuses on data collection, not crafting rules to address broader public health infrastructure issues immediately.
Choice B reason: Assurance ensures health services are available, like enforcing clinic access for the homeless. It follows assessment, not the act of evaluating needs under a bridge, which prioritizes gathering data over guaranteeing interventions or monitoring compliance with health standards directly.
Choice C reason: Primary prevention, like vaccinations, stops disease before it starts. Walking under a bridge to assess needs isn’t preventive action but data collection to understand health risks among the homeless, not directly reducing disease incidence at that moment.
Choice D reason: Assessment involves collecting data on health status, as seen here with nurses evaluating homeless needs under a bridge. It’s foundational, identifying risks like malnutrition or infection prevalence, enabling subsequent interventions without immediately altering conditions or enforcing services directly.
Nursing Test Bank
Naxlex Comprehensive Predictor Exams
Related Questions
Correct Answer is D
Explanation
Choice A reason: True positives formula is sensitivity, not incidence. New cases fit, per epidemiology. This errors in purpose. It’s universally distinct.
Choice B reason: Adding old cases is prevalence; incidence uses new only. This misaligns with nursing standards. It’s universally distinct, wrong metric.
Choice C reason: True negatives assess specificity, not incidence rate. New cases are correct. This errors per epidemiology. It’s universally distinct.
Choice D reason: Incidence rate uses new cases over population, standard formula. This aligns with epidemiology standards. It’s universally applied, distinctly accurate.
Correct Answer is A
Explanation
Choice A reason: Prevalence measures all cases (new and existing) of a disease in a population at a given time. This formula captures total burden, like diabetes cases, divided by population, adjusted by a base (e.g., 1000), reflecting overall disease presence accurately.
Choice B reason: This formula calculates sensitivity, not prevalence. It’s used in diagnostics to assess true positive rates for diseases like cancer against missed cases, focusing on test accuracy, not the total number of affected individuals in a population over time.
Choice C reason: This represents specificity, evaluating true negatives in diagnostic testing, not prevalence. It’s relevant for ruling out disease, like tuberculosis, but doesn’t quantify how many people currently have it within a population, missing the broader epidemiological scope entirely.
Choice D reason: This defines incidence, not prevalence, counting only new cases over time, like annual flu cases. It excludes existing cases, underrepresenting the total disease load in a population, which prevalence aims to capture comprehensively for health planning.
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