Healthy Places, Healthy People: A Handbook for Culturally Competent Community Nursing Practice

This revolutionary book is the first of its kind designed to provide nurses the tactics and tools to help them approach public health nursing through the tapestry of culture and community instead of the individual. By looking through the clarifying lenses of anthropology, economics, political science, sociology, and epidemiology, and other soft and hard sciences, the authors show a clear and powerful connection to health of the larger community and the health of individuals. Once this connection is made, the health care team--of which the public health nurse is uniquely positioned to lead--can focus energies and funding on affecting change and affecting health. Intentionally, Healthy Places, Healthy People de-emphasizes the care of individuals and families, not because it is not important, but rather to introduce students to a kind of nursing practice--focused on health rather than disease, on communities rather than individuals, and on strengths as well as failings. Two chapters are devoted exclusively to community and cultural assessment, with a quick and easy-to-use assessment approach laid out in sidebar boxes throughout these chapters. It is ideal for undergraduate and graduate nursing students and practicing nurses who are not familiar with population-based culturally sensitive care. The author team of Melanie Dreher, Dolores Shapiro and Micheline Asselin together have a powerful command of a wide range of issues in community health nursing, including a strong grounding in practice issues, public health policy, anthropology, and scholarship. A Teaching Guide is available to instructors who adopt the book for use in their courses as a free downloadable PDF file. Contact the publisher at 1.888.654.4968 to arrange for your teaching guide.