Deck 1: The History of Community Health Nursing in Canada

Question 1

What are some lessons from past leaders in nursing that can influence your advocacy work to respond to the early childhood development in your district?

Answer 1

-Past leaders in community health nursing learned about the impact of social determinants on the health of their clients. They also learned that Mothers need support and assistance to ensure the health of their children.

Question 2

What current considerations does the PHN need to take into account when establishing priorities to respond to the inequities witnessed?

Answer 2

-PHNs need to take into account the identified needs of their clients when establishing priorities to respond to the inequities witnessed. The first step in assessing needs is to ask the client themselves and involve them in any planned actions.

Question 3

What are some opportunities the PHN can pursue to strive for health equity for the children in the community?

Answer 3

-Opportunities the PHN can pursue to strive for health equity for the children in the community are to do a community assessment to determine what the health equity issues are, then establish priority programs designed to assist those most vulnerable such as food banks, housing assistance and shelters.

Question 4

What are key factors influencing the development and implementation of the social determinants of health work in community health nursing?

Question 5

What are some of the tensions in enabling nurses to address the social determinants of health?

Question 6

What are some strategies CHNs can implement in practice for health equity?

Question 7

Community health nursing has frequently been described as more autonomous than nursing practice in institutional settings. However, Eunice Dyke, Toronto's first supervisor of public health nursing, once stated that "...public health nursing has in the medical profession its greatest friend and not infrequently its greatest stumbling block." How autonomous was the practice of early community health nurses?

Question 8

What role did middle-class ideas about class, ethnicity, and gender play in the development of public health programs to protect the health of infants and children?

Question 9

Reflecting on community health nursing education in your nursing program, what issues do you see that are continuous with the past as described in this chapter?

Question 10

Social historians such as Alan Hunt (1999) argue that charity, philanthropy, and welfare programs are essentially efforts by the elite and middle classes to impose their behaviour, values, and culture upon others. Hunt describes these programs of moral or social regulation as being inspired by "...the passionate conviction that there is something inherently wrong or immoral about the conduct of others" (p. ix). Locate an issue of an early public health or nursing journal such as The Public Health Journal (now the Canadian Journal of Public Health) or The Canadian Nurse (particularly the section on public health). Conduct a brief content analysis of the issue, paying close attention to how the recipients of public health interventions are described. What conclusions can be drawn about the attitudes of healthcare professionals? What anxieties seem to underlie the interventions they describe and recommend to other healthcare practitioners?

Question 11

Nurses were the intermediaries between the clients they served and the social and political elite who employed them to work in the community. However, their perspective on the objectives and effectiveness of community health programs is often absent from published histories of public health. To fill this gap in the historical record, do one of the following: (1) locate a biographical account written by an early visiting or public health nurse, (2) locate an oral history of an early visiting or public health nurse in an archive, or (3) interview a retired visiting or public health nurse. How does their account resemble and differ from the history of community health nursing presented in this chapter? How would you account for any differences you identify?

Question 12

Based on what you have learned about the history of community health nursing in Canada, what do you believe are the greatest challenges facing nurses in this practice setting today and in the future?