Public health nursing entails working with different communities to ensure they are protected and living in a healthy environment. Based on Dorothea Dix analysis, the early public health nurse worked to restore the status of the prisons as well as facilities of the mentally ill. These are challenges that are still being faced to date as the demand for the facilities have increased. The population has outgrown the capacity of these facilities. Prisons are established as correctional facility where the prisoners are to be corrected to enable them live a healthy life. On the contrary, the olden days prisons exposed prisoners to brutally as well as sexual harassment that increased the rate of development of mental disorders.
The concerns raised by Dix were received positively by the federal government and other agencies. This was seen through the expansion of the facilities as well as adoption of her ideas in the mental health facities available as well as those developed. This is because, the prisons housed the criminals and the mentally ill side by side in unhygienic and unregulated environment. The environment increased the levels of misdiagnosis and development of other health issues affecting both the clinician and the clients.
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Today, the prisons and the mentally ill facilities are separated and thus reduction of violent incidents occurrence. Despite this, the prisoners are still exposed to brutal experience that is meant to change their approaches. The hygiene has improved but as opposed to external funding for correction services, the prisoners are meant to clean the prisons themselves as a form of correctional exercise. In the mentally ill institutions, the nurses, the public health nurses are expected to carry out the assessment of the clients and determine the variables that determine the health status of a place (Harkness & Marco, 2016). In conclusion, the public health nurses today are still faced with the same issues as before only the approach of addressing it has changed.
References
Harkness, G. & De Marco, R. (2016). Community and public health nursing evidence for practice (2nd ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Wolters Kluwer. ISBN 978-1451130218
