Shoring Up the Frontline of Prevention: Strengthening Curricula With Community and Public Health Nursing

ABSTRACT

Hailed by some as a paradigm shift in nursing education and practice, this emphasis is not new for public health nurse educators. Since 1965, community and public health nursing content has been part of the required baccalaureate nursing curriculum.11 However, advancing the quality and augmenting the impact of community and public health nursing education, practice, and research is critical for improved local to global health outcomes. [...]we assert the need for the clinical core of the nursing curriculum to include opportunities for intervention at all levels of practice preparing nurses to design and deliver care at the level of the individual, family, community, systems, and populations.12 To implement this directional change, essential knowledge and skills in systems awareness, change management, cost containment, resource allocation, communication, team building, equity, and inclusion are required for competent, evidence-based practice, as is the development of competencies in informatics, data science, design, and systems thinking. Additionally, effective advocacy requires consideration of the social needs of individuals, which are inextricably connected to structural determinants at the community, society, and policy level. [...]to affect the health of populations, nurses are called upon to make this broader, more integral connection between policies, systems, and environmental impact. Many community and public health nurses work in small, local public health departments unaffiliated with large academic institutions or hospitals and have limited access to evidence-based resources or financial support for professional development. Since 2017, the Nursing Experts Translating the Evidence project, an interprofessional collaborative effort between nurses and librarians, has been educating public health nurses on the acquisition, translation, and application of evidence to inform their practice.19 Through active community-academic-practice partnerships, community and public health nursing educators and governmental and nongovernmental public health agencies can build capacity for community and public health nursing practice for the future, as we continue to apply evidence-based, data-driven problem solving through the pandemic and beyond.