An Introduction to Community and Public Health Nursing
An Introduction to Community and Public Health Nursing
Overview
The focus of this chapter is to provide an overview of community and public health nursing and highlight its importance in protecting, preserving, and promoting the public’s health and safety. The different levels of disease prevention are presented and discussed in consideration of the social determinants of health and health promotion. The chapter provides the common ethical frameworks and theories that guide the work of public and community health nurses.
Learning Objectives
- Define community and public health nursing
- Discuss the roles and settings of public health nurses
- Differentiate between primordial, primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary prevention
- Identify the major nursing, social, and public health theories that guide community health education, promotion, and prevention programs
- Identify community health nursing roles and practice settings
- Discuss the ethical principles that guide and influence community health nursing
Key Terms
- public health nursing
- community health nursing
- vulnerable populations
- primordial prevention
- primary prevention
- secondary prevention
- tertiary prevention
- quaternary prevention
Introduction
The success or failure of any government, in the final analysis, must be measured by the well-being of its citizens. Nothing can be more important to a state than its public health; the state’s paramount concern should be the health of its people.
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Quoted in Gostin, 2000).
Public and community health nursing is a unique aspect of nursing practice. Nurses who work in the community must develop a broad array of knowledge and skills that inform a collaborative approach to improving the health of individuals, families, and whole communities. Community health nurses work directly with community members in roles like home health and school nursing or through community-based organizations. Public health nurses tend to work with city or state institutions such as the public health department. Though many provide direct care through clinics, many also work to achieve local or statewide population-level health goals. In this chapter, you will learn more about the roles of community and public health nurses, the populations of people they work with, and the overarching approaches to this type of work.
Public and Community Health Nursing
The American Public Health Association defines public health nursing as “the practice of promoting and protecting the health of populations using knowledge from nursing, social and public health sciences” (American Nurses Association [ANA], 2022). Community health nursing is a subset of public health nursing but focuses on specific communities, usually defined in geographic terms. The term community health nurse is often used to define a role (e.g., school nurse) more specifically. The public health nurse encompasses the roles of community health nurses but also includes roles that