NEW BOOK
|
HONOR SOCIETY BOOK REVIEWHealthy Places, Healthy People: by Melanie Dreher, RN, PhD, FAAN, Dolores Shapiro, RN, PhD, and Micheline Asselin, RN, MPA, MSN, CHPN Reviewed by Mary Lou De Natale The authors of Healthy Places, Healthy People introduce ways to assess and support a culturally grounded plan of care for at-risk populations while advocating new community-based initiatives that promote social justice. They emphasize that the community is a work-in-progress in which the nurse must identify relevant components that influence the health of its residents and learn about the social, economic, political and physical conditions of that environment. Now is a critical time to support this new energy and enthusiasm for community health care, health care that is not isolated to a specific individual or group but geared to preventing and reducing health disparities that affect the entire community. This book helps renew commitment of nurses to community social justice and enables them to identify and deploy the cultural capital required to build community capacity and promote public health.
Using as examples treatment of obesity-related illness and having blood available in the event of an emergency, the authors show how social rules, norms and patterns of behavior can affect marketing, public education programs, personal health services and community-based health initiatives. To properly promote social justice in a community, nurses must focus less on an individual’s health and access to health care and more on the community with regard to its economic stability, educational opportunities, community institutions, and citizen and group participation. Nurses can strengthen existing communication bridges within a community by learning, from a cultural perspective, about public health issues that affect it. To positively influence access to care, its cost and its outcomes, write the authors, the continuing challenge for nurses will be to assess, plan and evaluate the communities in which they work from the perspectives of social networks, religious institutions, educational resources and commonly held values. With knowledge and experience, nurses will gain better understanding of a community’s capacity for health and wellness and, as a result, become more effective at engaging its citizens in community-level action. The examples provided in this book are real and can be globally applied. A community’s health care providers work in an environment influenced by predictions made five, 10 and 20 years ago. In the meantime, individuals, families and providers in that community have changed. To adjust to the new situation, a plan must be developed to educate families and promote quality decision-making with regard to health care. As the authors note, a culturally grounded plan is one that makes sense to the people who live out their daily lives in a particular community. For the nurse who desires to learn more about effective community practice, this book provides much helpful information. Ultimately, a community must assume ownership of its own health, learning from and drawing upon resources available to it. To achieve culturally based planning with minimal upheaval and cost to the community, it is important that nurses learn to focus on desired outcomes rather than specific interventions. Healthy Places, Healthy People will help future nurses and those currently in community practice learn how to ask the right questions when conducting a community or cultural assessment. They will also understand how to communicate more effectively with key policy-makers and community partners about shared costs and responsibilities. Nurses need to understand their roles in improving the health
and wellness of their communities. I highly recommend Healthy
Places, Healthy People as a textbook for use in both undergraduate
and graduate-level nursing courses. RNL |
Commitment
to providing culturally competent health care begins by including
all community members and organizations. As nurses practice in
various communities, it is important to reflect on new strategies
to guide and support decision-making. Communities need nurses
able to understand channels of communication, social processes
and organized forces that support management of cost-effective
care.
This
anthropological approach to community health helps nurses, educators,
researchers, health care providers and nursing students who work
in communities to support change. It also helps further the goals
of Healthy People 2010, a U.S. health promotion and disease
prevention initiative that seeks to increase quality and length
of life while eliminating health disparities. Connection to a
client’s way of life, values, educational background, social
status, family responsibilities and knowledge of his or her illness
is important for a nurse to learn and apply to practice. Community
health nurses have a responsibility to know more than the rate
of HIV infection, prevalence of diabetes or incidence of low birth
weights. They need to be culturally competent and able to build
bridges and alliances that positively influence change and public
health policy.