Nurse Home Visiting Programs
In these programs, community and public health nurses work with families to visit their homes in the bid to assess family health status, needs, and their environment to come up with tailored interventions and identify available resources. In terms of benefits to the community, Chartier et al. (2017) ascertain that home visiting programs by nurses are among the most substantially spread interventions to support at-risk families, especially in reducing or curbing child maltreatment and improving healthy development for families living in poverty or those dealing with mental health problems. Further, the community benefits from reduced juvenile delinquencies and child neglect. Fundamental services provided by these nurses include determining safety, emotional needs, nutrition status, and relationship support needs. Further, they provide counseling, education, and referrals as per the family needs. Also, they provide aid to new mothers in setting goals for making healthy lifestyle choices and fostering personal growth. Other salient services offered by the nurses to families and community at large include genetic counseling and advising on the different available tests.
Community Nursing Centers
These are community-based care settings located in both urban and rural areas. Here the services provided to the community are focused on the underserved populations. Thus, nurses’ services here focus on not only health promotion but also disease prevention. As such, similar to visiting home programs, nurses provide health screening, education, and well-child care. The community benefits from the secondary and tertiary prevention services offered by the nurses, including management of chronic and acute health conditions as well as mental health counseling.
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Further, families and community become empowered, primarily through education and counseling to meet their own healthcare objectives or goals. Community and public health nurses are further useful by assisting parents in promoting health, long-term learning, and fostering positive behavior among children within their first six years. Also, nurses advise on new parenting skills and linkages to other services within the community, such as prenatal nutrition programs.
Public Health Departments
These are county and state-run health departments whose impacts ripple across local, state, and national levels. As such, these departments assess core health functions, such as policy development and assurance. The departments further provide services to pregnant and childbearing families, children with special care needs, individuals at risk or diagnosed with acute health conditions, and those diagnosed with infectious diseases. Thus, nurses, as a part of these departments, provide health services such as diagnosis and treatment, health promotion, epidemiology, community health assessment, disease surveillance, and policy development. Further, families and communities benefit from chronic pain management, especially older adults, through a productive nurse-patient relationship. According to Uhrenfeldt et al. (2018), this relationship based on mutual trust helps nurses impart knowledge to patients and also improve health outcomes in the present and future through person-oriented care.
Home and Community Education
The fundamental goal of this program is to strengthen individuals, families, and communities through education, leadership, and service or counseling. According to Fooladi (2015), community awareness is a central concept of preventive healthcare. As such, nurses here not only educate but also provide counseling services regarding proper nutrition, disease prevention, genetics, family planning, caring for patients diagnosed with acute medical conditions, and appropriate and healthy lifestyle. Further, nurses provide education to young adolescents regarding proper and healthy behavior, a facet which reduces delinquencies within the communities. Families and communities benefit from health promotion tips as well as how to care for the elderly and at-risk populations such as children. Further, vulnerable cohorts such as those living in poverty learn how and where to assess government-funded health services as well as incurrence.
Family Health Nursing in Community Health Settings
Nurses in these settings provide education and counseling regarding preventing health-related issues. These settings, according to Fooladi (2015), include satellite clinics, health departments, and outpatient facilities. In these settings and other similar ones, nurses offer cure-based services to the families and community at large. Further, other services such as health screening, identification of unhealthy and risky habits such as smoking and drinking, and identifying weight-related issues in the primary care settings are provided. Furthermore, to deal with homeless families, nurses in these settings specify participation in service-learning clinical rotation with nursing students as well as practitioners. Other services include child and adult immunization as well as prenatal and dental care for child-bearing women and adolescents, which benefit these groups and the community as a whole. Also, readmission rates tend to reduce through nursing in these settings.
References
Chartier, M. J., Brownell, M. D., Isaac, M. R., Chateau, D., Nickel, N. C., Katz, A., ... & Taylor, C. (2017). Is the families first home visiting program effective in reducing child maltreatment and improving child development? Child Maltreatment , 22 (2), 121-131. DOI: 10.1177/1077559517701230
Fooladi, M. M. (2015). The role of nurses in community awareness and preventive health. International journal of community-based nursing and midwifery , 3 (4), 328. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4591566/#__ffn_sectitle
Uhrenfeldt, L., Sørensen, E. E., Bahnsen, I. B., & Pedersen, P. U. (2018). The centrality of the nurse-patient relationship: a Scandinavian perspective. Journal of clinical nursing , 27 (15-16), 3197-3204. https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.14381
