Module 7: Community Educational Project Presentation
One of the initiatives from which the view of what a “client” is in nursing is community educational projects. Community education projects through public health nursing in modern healthcare have enabled care providers to interact with patients more closely, even outside the healthcare setting. Olson et al. (2021) note that the change in the perspective of a client has shaped how nurses conduct assessments, implement interventions, and evaluate outcomes. This discussion explores how my view of what a client is has changed and expanded, and explores the major differences between the assessment of a public health nurse and a clinical nurse.
My view of a client has changed and expanded over time. Initially, I used to view a client as an individual patient receiving direct care in a clinical setting, such as an individual patient seeking treatment for a specific illness. However, with increased interactions with public health nursing and community-based holistic care, the client, to me, has broadened to not just the individual patient, but also includes the patient’s family, communities, and health populations in general. Public health has influenced the change in my perspective on a client through an emphasis on health promotion and disease prevention.
Furthermore, I also view the client as an inclusion of the individual patients’ family unit and the neighborhood they live in. A study by Karam et al. (2021) shows that the patient’s family and the environment in which they exist play a crucial role in the health of an individual patient, directly through caregiving or indirectly through support. I have also come to appreciate the role of a community or neighborhood as part of a client. For instance, when dealing with a patient with obesity, neighborhood factors such as the environment, food availability, and local policy structures are necessary to consider, since they influence health behaviors.
There are various significant differences between the assessment of a public health nurse and a clinical nurse. Since clinical nursing is primarily individual and family-based, the assessment of a clinical nurse involves collecting subjective and objective data from patients. In contrast, the assessment of a public health nurse is population-focused, meaning that the nurse conducts community assessments to identify health needs, trends, and disparities across groups, rather than focusing solely on an individual patient. Additionally, while a clinical nurse assesses subjective and objective data from patients through history taking, physical examinations, and diagnostic tests, the public health nurse uses tools such as epidemiological data, community health surveys, windshield surveys, and population health indicators (Pazzaglia et al., 2023).
Another major difference between a clinical nurse’s assessment and a public health nurse’s assessment is the nature of the assessment. Clinical assessments are reactive, since they typically address health problems with an emphasis on restoring health, managing conditions, and improving the individual’s quality of life. On the other hand, public health assessments are preventive in nature, in that they emphasize implementing interventions focusing on a community’s long-term outcomes. For example, a public health nurse may assess the prevalence of hypertension across a community to collaborate with stakeholders to implement community-wide interventions to address it.
My view of a client has expanded from an individual-centered perspective to a holistic, population-based understanding. Recognizing families, communities, and systems as clients highlights the interconnectedness of health determinants and the importance of prevention and promotion in nursing practice. The differences between public health and clinical nursing assessments, as discussed above, reflect these expanded roles: public health nurses focus on populations and upstream interventions, while clinical nurses center on individuals and direct care.
References
Karam, M., Chouinard, M. C., Poitras, M. E., Couturier, Y., Vedel, I., Grgurevic, N., & Hudon, C. (2021). Nursing care coordination for patients with complex needs in primary healthcare: A scoping review. International Journal of Integrated Care, 21(1), 16. https://doi.org/10.5334/ijic.5518
Olson, A. W., Stratton, T. P., Isetts, B. J., Vaidyanathan, R., C Van Hooser, J., & Schommer, J. C. (2021). Seeing the Elephant: A systematic scoping review and comparison of patient-centeredness conceptualizations from three seminal perspectives. Journal of Multidisciplinary Healthcare, 14, 973–986. https://doi.org/10.2147/JMDH.S299765
Pazzaglia, C., Camedda, C., Ugenti, N. V., Trentin, A., Scalorbi, S., & Longobucco, Y. (2023). Community health assessment tools adoptable in nursing practice: A scoping review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(3), 1667. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20031667
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Discussion Question:
Explain how your view of what a “client” is has changed and expanded. What are some major differences between the assessment of a public health nurse and a clinical nurse?
