Community & Public Health Nursing: Promoting the Public’s Health

Community & Public Health Nursing is designed to provide students a basic grounding in public health nursing principles while emphasizing aggregate-level nursing. While weaving in meaningful examples from practice throughout the text, the authors coach students on how to navigate between conceptualizing about a population-focus while also continuing to advocate and care for individuals, families, and aggregates. This student-friendly, highly illustrated text engages students, and by doing so, eases students into readily applying public health principles along with evidence-based practice, nursing science, and skills that promote health, prevent disease, as well as protect at-risk populations!  What the 8th edition of this text does best is assist students in broadening the base of their knowledge and skills that they can employ in both the community and acute care settings, while the newly enhanced ancillary resources offers interactive tools that allow students of all learning styles to master public health nursing.

• Learning Objectives and Key Terms sharpen the reader’s focus and provide a quick guide for learning the chapter content.
• A Summary of highlights at the end of each chapter provides an overview of material covered and serves as a review for study.
• Activities to Promote Critical Thinking at the close of each chapter are designed to challenge students, promote critical-thinking skills, and encourage active involvement in solving community health problems. They include Internet activities.
• Recurring Displays, Tables & Figures throughout the text highlight important content and create points of interest for student learning.
• Levels of Prevention Pyramid boxes enhance understanding of the levels of prevention concept, basic to community health nursing. Each box addresses a chapter topic, describes nursing actions at each of the three levels of prevention, and is unique to this text in its complexity and comprehensiveness.
• Evidence-based Practice — this feature incorporates current research examples and how they can be applied to public/community health nursing practice to achieve optimal client/aggregate outcomes.
• From the Case Files—presentation of a scenario/case study with student-centered, application-based questions. Emphasizing nursing process, students are challenged to reflect on assessment and intervention in typical, yet challenging examples.
• Perspectives—this feature is included in most chapters and provides stories (viewpoints) from a variety of sources. The perspective may be from a nursing student, a novice or experienced public health nurse, a faculty member, a policy maker, or a client. These short features are designed to promote critical thinking, reflect on commonly held misconceptions about public/community health nursing, or to recognize the link between skills learned in this specialty practice and other practice settings, especially acute care hospitals.
• New art has been added throughout the text to clarify important concepts and enhance interest in and understanding of material.
• An emphasis on aggregate-level nursing and the community health nurse’s opportunity and responsibility not only to serve individuals and families, but also to promote and protect the health of communities and populations.
• An emphasis on health promotion, health protection, and illness prevention. This, in addition to the aggregate emphasis, reflects the view set forth in this text that community health nursing is the amalgamation of nursing science with public health science. Public health philosophy, values, knowledge, and skills are an essential part of all community health nursing practice.
• A balance of theory with application to nursing practice. The 7th edition continues the presentation of theoretical and conceptual knowledge to provide an understanding of human needs and a rationale for nursing actions. At the same time, the text presents practical information on the use of theory to undergird practice.
• A student-friendly writing style has been a hallmark of this text since the first edition. Topics are expressed and concepts explained to enhance understanding and capture interest.  Writing style remains consistent throughout the text (including contributed chapters) to promote an uninterrupted flow of ideas and enhance learning.