Community Health Nursing has a very distinguished history of its own. Initially, community nurses lived in the area where they nursed and went to homes as assistants of the doctors that they worked with. They would lug around a huge suitcase kind of thing that contained stuff they needed--basically a nurse on wheels. They would make regular visits to people in their neighborhood to see how they were getting along (kind of like home health nurses do). They would help them with their ADLs and make sure they were getting their medical needs attended to. They interfaced with the doctors when the patients couldn't.
Eventually, public figures became involved as concerns over sanitation and communicable diseases became a source of concern when these nurses started seeing a lot of the social problems in the cities. Today, the public health departments mostly follow up on reports of problems with communicable disease that affect the larger community, i.e. outbreaks of salmonella among restaurant workers, TB among groups of drug users, rat or other pest infestations). When we did our public health department rotation, the public health nurses were mostly concerned with communicable diseases and making teaching visits and referrals to other city departments when they found problems related to this that needed attention. They did visits to restaurant workers who had been found with salmonella to make sure they had gotten treatment and knew how to prevent it from happening again, did home visits to children who had high serum lead levels during their well visits to try to identify the source of the lead ingestion, did follow up teaching with parents of children diagnosed with pica and there was a division that addressed problems with rats, water and sanitation.
You can probably get information on what your local public health nurses do if they have a website. If not, call your city or county administrative offices and ask for information about the public health department and public health nurses. This is a public service and our taxes pay for it. You are entitled to know what it is that they do. I am giving you a link to the LA County Public Health Department so you can see how vast their duties are.
Would you like to comment?
It is confusing me for some reason. 
do they work on improving conditions, like pollution, safe sex, etc. for the whole public?
