Community Empowerment and Community Partnerships in Nursing Decision-Making.

Pedro Melo,Odete Alves

doi:10.3390/healthcare7020076

Pedro Melo, Odete Alves

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare7020076

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Abstract

Community empowerment has been studied as a process and result phenomenon throughout the last 40 years. Community partnership, which has been studied during the last 20 years, has been identified as a key process to promote intervention and research within communities. In this paper, we introduce the relation between these two concepts, from the research that is being developed at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Health Research (CIIS) in Universidade Católica Portuguesa. We comment on the available evidence regarding community partnership and community empowerment within the Nursing Decision-Making process. There is a particular focus on Community Health Nursing Specialists (CHNS) and the aim to promote the identification of CHNS as potential community partnership developers within society. It is also important to analyze how community partnership processes are intentionally integrated as a nursing intervention within the nursing process. This analysis should occur from the nursing diagnosis to the evaluation of health gains in communities sensitive to CHNS care in a Nursing Theoretical Model developed from a Nursing PhD process—the Community Assessment, Intervention, and Empowerment Model.

Highlights

Community Health Nursing (CHN) in Portugal has its central skills published in law [1] and organized into four main skill categories: epidemiological survey, health planning, program and project management, and groups and community empowerment.The Community Assessment, Intervention, and Empowerment Model (MAIEC) [2,3] is a nursing theoretical model that bases clinical decision-making in CHN care on approaching communities as a care unit of nurses
We started with the questions: How are community empowerment and community partnerships related to Community Health Nursing? How do community health nurses integrate the community partnerships process in their decision-making?
Considering the framework analyzed above, we found a clear relationship between nursing decision-making related to a community as a care unit of nurses and community empowerment, decision-making related to a community as a care unit of nurses and community empowerment, integrating community partnerships into nursing diagnostic criteria and interventions

Summary

Introduction

Community Health Nursing (CHN) in Portugal has its central skills published in law [1] and organized into four main skill categories: epidemiological survey, health planning, program and project management, and groups and community empowerment. The Community Assessment, Intervention, and Empowerment Model (MAIEC) [2,3] is a nursing theoretical model that bases clinical decision-making in CHN care on approaching communities as a care unit of nurses. This model presents the main definitions of community, community environment, community health, and community nursing care, which are the assumptions and theoretical postulates that sustain collaborative decision-making between the nurse and the community [2,3,4,5]. We started with the questions: How are community empowerment and community partnerships related to Community Health Nursing? How do community health nurses integrate the community partnerships process in their decision-making?

Community Empowerment and Community Health Nursing

Community Partnerships and Community Empowerment

Framework

Discussion and Conclusions