History of Public Health Essay

Words: 916
Pages: 4

The History of Public Health and the Role of the Community/Public Health Nurse

Walden University
NURS 4010 Section 04, Family, Community, and Population-Based Care
10 / 21 / 2012

The History of Public Health and the Role of the Community/Public Health Nurse
Overview
Public health, a population-centered nursing had been in existence since the late 1880s under the guise of different names. The focus of public health nursing was on sanitation, communicable disease control, disease prevention and disability, and education. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the history of public health nursing and how it impacts the practice of nursing in the community.
History of Public Health Nursing
In the

Interventions focus on disease prevention, health promotion and protection, and on primary, secondary, and tertiary health care services. Primary prevention protects against threat to health. It prevents the prospects of potential health problems before they occur. Example is immunizations against communicable diseases. Secondary prevention is the effective treatment of a health problem when detected. Tertiary prevention is implemented after injury or diagnoses of a disease. This prevents existing problems from getting worse. Example is periodic blood glucose checks to monitor an existing diabetic condition.
Public health nurses not only share the nursing profession’s tradition to uphold the fights of individuals, but have other goals of maximizing the health of the population at risk (Oberle & Tenove, 2000). Situations seen as raising most ethical issues are the patient’s rights and the rights of the nurses to act in accordance with their professional values. Inter-professionally, ethical problems exist particularly with physicians when they tend to devalue nursing knowledge. For instance, a physician actively denigrating a nurse’s advice to a client on breast feeding. The nurse’s ethical concern is to ensure the client gets the best information without undermining the physician’s confidence. The attempt to work collaboratively yields only one-way communication. The nursing role to provide to