Reflective Essay On Community Nursing

The Community Nursing (3QQ3) course has been an eye opening journey for me in to the world of community nursing. At the start of the initial course doing the practice tools I was quite apprehensive and had no idea what to expect. It was hard in the early few weeks to see how this course would evolve. But, as I became oriented and more familiar with the community the bigger picture began to form. Indeed, the windshield survey was a great tool to assess our community. This was an assessment unlike any other I had performed as the community is a large area with thousands of residents and families. As a nurse, so many nursing actions arise from an assessment and it is imperative to perform a good assessment of your client no matter what issue is. However, when performing an assessment for a community with thousands of inhabitants the traditional head to toe assessment is of little use. In this course, the use of the windshield survey, practice tools, and statistical information are certainly the keys to performing good community assessments. One thing that did surprise me was the amount of detailed local information that can be gathered from Statistics …show more content…
Indeed, a community nurse has a greater proactive and preventative role in population health. I have certainly had the opportunity to solidify this knowledge over the past 11 weeks. Unfortunately, it seems that much of our health care system is focused on reactive interventions rather than preventative ones. Undeniably, a reactive approach is certainly more costly than a preventative one in terms of health care and the sooner governments put more emphasis on preventative health measures the better off we will be as a population. With this understanding, as a BScN student in reactive nursing settings, I will be sure to place a greater emphasis on client health teaching, empowerment, and health