Vulnerable Population Paper

Vulnerable populations is refer to social groups or individuals that are who have an increased propensity to unfavorable health outcomes which include premature death or mortality, decreased functional status, relative morbidity, and diminished quality of life (Rewlett, 2011). In maryland, the community of Conowingo fall into these categories due to shortage of primary care providers as a result escalating the vulnerabilities to this community. The people of Conowingo in Maryland are victims of lack of access to care, poor utilization of health promotion and negative health outcomes (Rewlett, 2011). In order to care for this population, the two model identified are the vulnerable populations conceptual model by Flaskerud and Winslow (1998), and health belief model by Becker, 1977 will be used (Rawlett, 2011).
The VPCM emphasized on the interactive connection among accessibility of resources, health status and relative risk in a population. The VPCM can be useful to vulnerable underserved or deprived elderly population because it conveys a comprehensive assessment of these groups by a population focused practitioners. According to Smith (2011), a comprehensive assessment of these populations is important because the low-income individuals has limited resources that results to elevated risks for

mortality and morbidity. The VPCM encompasses three concepts; (1) availability of resources, this is a reflection of the individual and community level to access health care, financial, and geographic factors, examples are income, jobs and health education. (2) Relative risk: this deal with the health risk factors (biological and behavioral), and (3) health status is strictly affected by resources and their accessibilities, such as the prevalence, incidence, mortality, and morbidity rate (Smith, 2011).
The health belief model: the essence of a HBM in the study of the vulnerable population is that the belief of an individual in the community affects that a persons’ actions is a reflective of their health status.

The HBM has four concepts; (1) perceived susceptibility is the personal belief that condition or illness is unavoidable, (2) perceived severity- this is personal or individual view of the amplitude of the illness and the consequences, (3) perceived benefits, individual thoughts of the availability and the recommended actions to avoid such as smoking cessation. (4) Perceived barrier refers to all the negative features of particular health action (Rawlett,

2011).
The similarity of the two models is both model serve as a conceptual framework in assessment of vulnerable underserved population in health promotion and disease prevention. The can be used to raise questions about population health disparities. In contrary, the VPCM has specific questions regarding access to health, health promotion services and disease status in a given vulnerable population (Rawlett, 2011).