Public Health Nursing

Book excerpt: Public Health Nursing: Practicing Population-Based Care explores the scientific discipline of public health and in particular public health nursing. This public health nursing perspective is applied throughout the chapters and demonstrates how public health nurses use various interventions based on best evidence in their practice, both to protect and enhance the health of the public. This innovative text includes key topics such as a discussion of historical evidence in coming to know the meaning of the terms used to describe public health nursing; the exploration of the use of technology in public health; social epidemiology as well as the traditional content on epidemiology; and an innovatively designed assessment tool that uses Healthy People 2010, A Systematic Approach to Health Improvement, as its framework. The highlight of this text is the focus on the 17 intervention strategies identified in the Population-Based Public Health Nursing Practice Intervention Wheel including a discussion of how these interventions may be applied to the three levels of practice: individual/family, community, and systems.