help!!!nervous......

Daytonite, BSN, RN · Jan 24, 2007

My Community Health involved two things. We spent our clinical time with the city public health nurses. We went with the nurses on their visits to homes to follow up on issues that they handled. I recall that most of it was for the purpose of teaching. They did a lot of follow up of Salmonella in restaurant workers. They went to the workers homes to teach and make sure the workers understood how the disease was transmitted and the importance of hygiene. They also did routine follow up on elevated lead levels in babies and children that were taken at community clinics during their well baby visits. Again, it was to inspect the home for possible evidence of what might be a source of the child's ingestion of the lead and to show and teach the parent's how to deal with it. Some of the neighborhoods were pretty bad; some weren't. The public health nurses told us that mostly, the neighborhood people understood that the nurses were there to help them, so they weren't hassled or bothered.

We were also each assigned a section of the city to investigate. We were to check out the community resources and interview the local leaders (councilmen, clergy, educators, nurses/doctors of any community clinics, etc.). Our project was to determine what the community health needs were in our section of the city. It was kind of like doing a care plan for our little part of the city. We had to come up with a feasible plan of something that would contribute to the overall benefit and health of the citizens of that particular area. This was basically a term paper, but an important part of our grade. If you think it's difficult to find nursing interventions for plain old medical problems, imagine what it's like to find interventions for community problems--and reference them for a paper!

I can't say what your instructors might be asking you do. It might be something totally different and may depend on what kind of services are available to the community in your area.