Introduction to Community Health Nursing Flashcards
What is the standard of practice for community health nursing?
“To promote, protect and preserve the health of individuals, families, groups, communities and populations wherever they live, work, learn, worship and play, in an ongoing rather than an episodic process.”
What are the roles of a community health nurse?
- Health Promotion
- Prevention and Health Protection
- Health Maintenance, Restoration (returning to baseline) and Palliation (to relieve or lessen without curing)
What is the difference between clients in acute care and clients in community?
When considering acute care, you look at the individual as the sole client
In community health nursing, clients can include individuals, communities or even populations
Describe the difference between community as a client and community as a setting
Client: Working with a particular group/population. We are implementing/creating a program/strategy that serves that particular client group/population - often health promotion strategies.
Setting: Place where nursing care takes place (can be individual or group receiving care). Includes all places that do not fall under traditional ‘acute care settings’
What are the guiding values and beliefs in community health nursing practice?
- Caring
- Multiple ways of knowing
- Individual and community partnership
- Empowerment, social justice and equity in health
- The principles of primary health care
Explain the guiding value/belief: Caring
- Specific, organized practices related to caring for and about others
- An ethic, a way of knowing, and practical knowledge are lived out in specific caring practices
- This is to recognize and discuss what is caring and what is not caring in specific instances
Explain the guiding value/belief: Multiple ways of knowing
- Acknowledges different health beliefs and practices based on culture/religion/family traditions
- Primacy placed on embodied/‘lived’ experience
- Nurse as ‘expert’ vs. nurse as ‘resource’
Explain the guiding value/belief: Equity
- Equity is the absence of avoidable or remediable differences among groups of people, whether those groups are defined socially, economically, demographically, or geographically
- Health inequities therefore involve more than inequality with respect to health determinants, access to the resources needed to improve and maintain health or health outcomes
- They also entail a failure to avoid or overcome inequalities that infringe on fairness and human rights norms
Explain the guiding value/belief: Empowerment
- Empowerment is a multi-dimensional social process that helps people gain control over their own lives
- It is a process that fosters power (that is, the capacity to implement) in people, for use in their own lives, their communities, and in their society, by acting on issues that they define as important
Explain the guiding value/belief: Social Justice
- Is the fair distribution of society’s benefits, responsibilities, and their consequences
- Based on the concept of human rights and equity, focusing on the position of one social group as compared to others
- Involves recognizing the root causes of disparities and engaging in civic action to eliminate them
Explain the guiding value/belief: Individual and community partnership
- Involves meaningful collaboration with people and communities.
- Pushes us to think about clients as active collaborators rather than passive ‘recipients’ of care.
- Recognizes community members as experts of their own lives and solution innovators
What examples of therapeutic elements that could be part of nursing care when centralizing the nurse-client relationship?
– Support individuals while adjusting to a new diagnosis
– Facilitate daily adaptation to acute/episodic/life-threatening illness through psychosocial support, education and resource mobilization
– Sustain hope for recovery or quality of life
How do community nurses keep the nurse-client relationship at the centre of their work?
- Bearing witness/‘holding people up’
- Facilitating unburdening of feelings/fears- ‘holding’ the disease and/or feelings of distress
- Serving as a stabilizing force- being an anchor
- Providing information/interpreting information to assist with decision-making
- Serving as a mirror to reflect back strengths and achievements
- Inspiring courage, belief and hope
- Striving to always meet the client where they’re at
How can we make sure that we are ‘striving to always meet the client where they’re at’?
- Consider competing priorities and deliver care where the person is located (both literally and figuratively)
- Reflect on own beliefs and biases
- Acknowledge and express respect for clients’ embodied knowledge of experiences of health and illness
- Understand and acknowledge the weight and force of difficult life circumstances like poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, isolation, emotional pain etc. and how these social circumstances shape the ‘choices’ they make
- Prioritize clients’ care priorities
