Hello! My name is Nicole Mangett and I am currently working as a family nurse practitioner with Hamilton’s Burton medical clinic. Prior to becoming a nurse practitioner, I worked as a registered nurse at a local hospital for several years. I worked primarily within a specialized orthopedic and neuroscience medical-surgical unit, but I also have experience with a variety of backgrounds including pulmonary care, general surgery, oncology, hospice, and rehabilitation services. After working as a floor nurse for a few years, I later accepted a position as a nursing supervisor over the same orthopedic and neuroscience unit mentioned above. Throughout my nursing journey, I have developed a great passion for healthcare and helping my patients become the healthiest version of themselves. A large part of that is preventative healthcare and wellness visits.
So, what is preventative healthcare? Oftentimes, in a hospital setting, I cared for patients who developed sudden, acute illnesses such as stroke, pneumonia, infected wounds, etc. I can say with confidence that adequate preventative healthcare likely would have prevented many of these hospitalizations. I like to think of preventative healthcare as having a proactive approach to healthcare, as opposed to a reactive approach. The goal of preventative health care is to complete routine wellness checks, such as your annual physical, cancer screenings, and blood work, to detect disease and illness early on and intervene with treatment before it progresses to a severe state.
Here are a few examples. When a person reaches a certain age, your health care provider will likely start talking to you about pap smears, colon cancer screenings, mammograms, or other screening tests. The goal of these tests is to screen for various types of cancer. Why do we do this? The answer is simple. Early cancer diagnosis and treatment leads to earlier treatment, which, in turn, leads to a better outcome, improved quality of life, and prolonged life. Here is another example. Primary risk factors for stroke include elevated cholesterol levels and coronary artery disease. When your healthcare provider does annual blood work, we check your cholesterol levels so that we can start any needed treatment to help decrease your cholesterol levels, thus reducing that risk of stroke, coronary artery disease, and heart attacks. The same is true for diabetes screening. We do routine screening to check for diabetes so that early treatment can be started, if necessary. Untreated diabetes increases your risk of eye and kidney damage, decreases wound healing, increases risk for infections, and leads to diabetic neuropathy, which is a loss of sensation in the legs and feet. The bottom line is this: the sooner your healthcare provider can identify any health concerns, illness, diseases, etc., the sooner they are able to intervene, and the sooner you, the patient, can reach optimal health.
Preventative health care and wellness visits are important for many reasons, but the most important reason is YOU and your overall wellbeing. As a healthcare provider, my primary goal is to keep my patients as healthy and happy as possible. So please, if you haven’t already, schedule an appointment for your annual wellness visit, and ask your provider about completing your annual preventative healthcare screening.
Preventative Healthcare with Hamilton Nurse Practitioner, Nicole Mangett
