Public Health

  Patient safety, a cornerstone of quality nursing care in most healthcare organizations, has not received attention in the specialty of public health nursing, owing to the conceptual challenges of applying this individual level concept to populations. Public health nurses (PHNs), by definition, provide population-focused care. Safe practice of population-focused nursing care involves preventing errors that would affect the health of entire populations and communities.

 American Indian women and children may be the most overrepresented among the list of disparate populations exposed to methylmercury. American Indian people fish on home reservations where a state or tribal fishing license (a source of advisory messaging) is not required. The purpose of this study was to examine fish consumption, advisory awareness, and risk communication preferences among American Indian women of childbearing age living on an inland Northwest reservation.

OBJECTIVES: To describe the environmental health (EH) demands placed on public health nurses (PHNs) as well as the barriers and facilitators to incorporating EH into PHN practice.
DESIGN AND SAMPLE: A cross-sectional multimode (Web and pencil/paper) survey was used to collect data from PHNs in 1 rural western state. Research participants included 141 PHNs from a total of 228 survey invitations (61% response).

 Reforming the public health infrastructure requires substantial system changes at the state level, including the reorganization of state agencies' plans, roles, and relationships with other sectors and communities. Beyond the limited time period of pilot programs and grants, how are these public health system changes to be sustained? Turning Point is an initiative of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to transform and strengthen the public health system.

 Reforms in the public health infrastructure such as those called for in recent Institute of Medicine reports require stakeholder engagement on different levels than traditional grass-roots community work. The Turning Point Initiative, funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, involves 21 state-wide partnerships established for systems change and focused in specific areas of public health innovation and policy development.

 Nearly a billion dollars were made available to state health departments through federal grants in the spring of 2002 for public health emergency preparedness plans. Twenty-one states had already been participating for some years in The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Turning Point Initiative.

 This article seeks to describe the current efforts of public health nurses involved in family violence prevention while on home visits, participating in community groups, working on special projects, and developing innovative policies. Despite a dearth of outcomes research and data regarding public health nursing practice in this area, both strengths and weakness in public health nursing practice are evident.

The United States is facing a severe shortage of well-trained public health workers, and public health nursing is the discipline with the greatest shortage. A local public health agency's (LPHA's) staffing and leadership characteristics are critical in determining its programs, performance, and capacity. A better understanding of the relationship between specific staffing and leadership characteristics and public health programs is needed to address this capacity challenge.

OBJECTIVE: This study examined the extent to which public health nurses (PHNs) see value in credentialing and perceive specific barriers related to a community/public health nursing (C/PHN) credential.
DESIGN: A cross-sectional exploratory survey was used to examine the perceived value of credentialing for PHNs and the perceived barriers to obtaining or maintaining the C/PHN credential as the primary variables of interest.
SAMPLE: Data were collected from 655 PHN members of national public health nursing organizations who participated in an online survey.

Reforming the public health infrastructure requires substantial system changes at the state level; state health agencies, however, often lack the resources and support for strategic planning and systemwide improvement. The Turning Point Initiative provided support for states to focus on large-scale system changes that resulted in increased funding for public health capacity and infrastructure development.