Community Health Nursing process: Characteristics and Importance

Introduction:

The community health nursing process is a systematic, rational method and providing nursing care for the prevention of disease and promotion of health of the community.

Nursing has an organized structure that helps nurses to efficiently apply their intellectual, psychomotor, and interpersonal skills. This structure is the nursing process. ‘’it is an orderly systematic manner of determining the patient’s problem, making plans to solve them, initiating the plan or assigning others to implement it, and evaluating the extent to which the plan was effective in resolving the problems identified’’.( Yura and Walsh, 1978).

Definition of Community Health Nursing process:

Community Health Nursing Process is a systematic, scientific, dynamic, on-going interpersonal process in which the nurses and the clients are viewed as a system with each affecting one and another and both being affected by the factors within the behavior.

Nature or Concept of Community Health Nursing process:

There are different key concepts of the community health nursing process which are mentioned below:

• The nursing process provides a framework for the practice of nursing. It involves both art and science.
• The nursing process refers to a series of planned steps and actions directed at meeting the needs and solving the problems of patients.
• The nursing process is a deliberative problem-solving approach that requires cognitive, technical, and interpersonal skills and is directed to meeting the needs of the patient.
• The nursing process is a goal-oriented humanistic and systemic plan of individualized care that is both effective and efficient.
• The nursing process is a problem-solving process that addresses community health problems at all aggregate levels and aims to prevent illness.
• The nursing process is a deliberate intellectual activity whereby the practice of nursing is approached in a dynamic, systematic manner to patient care in a dynamic, continuous method to assist the patient to achieve and maintain health.
• The nursing process is dynamic and continuous. It provides blueprint care and responds to the client’s needs in a timely and reasonable manner to improve or maintain the client’s level of health.

Importance or Implications of Community Health Nursing process:

All the importance of the community health nursing process have presented in the following:

1. The nursing process helps to identify the client’s health care needs, determine priorities, establish goals and expected outcomes of care establish and communicate a client-centered plan of care, and provide nursing interventions designed to meet client outcomes and goals.
2. The nursing process involves scientific reasoning. The nurse makes inferences about the meaning of a client’s functional state of health. The nursing makes the process is simply one variation of scientific reasoning that allows nurses to organize, systemize, and conceptualize nursing practice. It is a general approach to the client system of individuals, families, groups, or communities.
3. The nursing process approach allows nurses to differentiate their practice from that of physicians and other health care professionals. When nurses think critically, the client becomes an active participant and the ultimate outcomes are a comprehensive, individualized approach to care.
4. The nursing process forms the basis for nursing judgments in the form of diagnosis, nursing care plan, implementation, and evaluation. Conceptual frameworks such as pain management or theoretical models give a basis for determining the information to be collected, diagnostic areas to be considered and nursing goals and therapies.

Characteristics of Community Health Nursing process:

The nursing process provides a framework or structure upon which community health nursing actions are based. The application of the process varies with each situation, but the nature of the process remains the same. Certain elements are important for community health nurses to emphasize in their practice.

1. The process is deliberative (Weidenbach, 1964):

That is purposefully, rationally, and care throughout the care. This requires judgment. The situation demands independent thinking and difficult decision making.

2. The process is adaptable (Lewis, 1988):

This dynamic nature enables the community health nurse to adjust appropriately to each situation to be flexible in applying the process to the individual needs. The nurse adapts individual service to each community client.

3. The process is cyclical ( Henlay, 1986):

The actions are in constant progression. The nurse in any given situation engages continual interaction, data collection, analysis, intervention, and evaluation. Steps are repeated over and over in the nurse-client relationship continuously.

4. Client-focused (Hooper, 1986):

Nurses use this process to help clients, directly or indirectly to achieve and maintain health.

5. The process is interactive (Yura and Walsh, 1973):

Nurses and clients are engaged in the process of ongoing interpersonal communication. Giving and receiving accurate information is necessary to promote understanding between nurse and client and foster effective use of the nursing process. The client-nurse relationship can and should be a partnership called ‘’peer practice’’.

6. Need- oriented (Steps, 1976):

Application of this nursing process in community health to the anticipation of needs and prevention of problems assumes additional significance. This focus is needed if we are to realize the goals of community health to protect promote and restore people’s health.

Conclusion:

In every discipline, the nursing process is used to their professional practice differently using various names, prevention of illness, and maintenance of health care common goals in all areas of community health. The nursing process which is otherwise known as the problem-solving approach is a tool or guide for the provision of quality nursing care. A community health nurse provides skilled nursing care by making professional judgments and renders good nursing care to the family and the community.

References:

1. Kamalam. S (2012). Essentials in Community Health Nursing Practice (2nd Edition).
   New Delhi: Jaypee Brothers Medical Publishers (P) Ltd.
2. Clement. I (2009). Basic Concepts of Community Health Nursing (2nd Edition).
   New Delhi: Jaypee Brothers Medical Publishers (P) Ltd.

Maria Mona

Maria Khatun Mona is a Founder and Editor of Nursing Exercise Blog. She is a Nursing and Midwifery Expert. Currently she is working as a Registered Nurse at Evercare Hospital, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has great passion in writing different articles on Nursing and Midwifery. Mail her at “[email protected]”