NURSING 255 Community Health Nursing Exam #1

NURSING 255 Community Health Nursing Exam #1 Chapter 1: Overview of Public Health; Introduction to Community Health Nursing What is Public Health?: Public Health: a scientific discipline that includes the study of epidemiology, statistics, and assessment—including attention to behavioral, cultural, and economic factors – as well as program planning and policy development - Public health can be best described as what society collectively does to ensure that conditions exist in which people can be healthy; it is a community oriented, population focused specialty area - Goal of public health is to organize community efforts that will use scientific and technical knowledge to prevent disease and promote health - Public health practice provides many benefits, especially considering the small portion of the heath care budget in the US that is used for this prevention and population-focused specialty (most of the money is given to acute care facilities instead) Benefits from Public Health: - Dramatic increase in life expectancy (primarily due to improvements in sanitation, control of infectious diseases with immunizations) - Decreased number of deaths from stroke, coronary heart disease and cancer (due to changes in tobacco use, blood pressure control and dietar