Public health nursing comes of age

A decade ago, the World Health Organization's Committee on Community Health Nursing defined the emerging role of public health nursing in primary health care.(1) The report focused attention on untapped nursing potentials and added impetus to the dynamic movement that had begun 10 years earlier with the first Child Health Nurse Practitioner. By 1974, public health nursing had come a long way since the early 1930s, when it was struggling to assert itself as a full-fledged member of the public health system while coping with differences both within the profession and within the organizational structure of practice. Although the importance of specialized preparation for home visiting had been recognized from the beginning, the majority of nurses in service had little or no academic preparation in public health. And, as Wilkerson points out,(2) the shifting of service from the voluntary visiting nurse structure to the official agency not only relegated decision making for nursing services to health officers, it splintered general nursing into preventive and sick care and fomented rivalry between 'visiting' and 'public health' nurses which further undermined the possibility of comprehensive health care.