Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Issue link: http://dysoncollege.uberflip.com/i/128987
The Collective Work of Many Throughout these reports, there is frequent reference to partnerships, coalitions, consortiums, and collaborations. To ensure the health and well-being of the public, communities, organizations, and professional specializations must share responsibility. An Institute of Medicine report (2003) talks about the collective endeavor of multiple individuals and organizations and calls these participants "actors." These actors are in the public sector at local, state, and federal levels, as well as in the private sector, such as healthcare delivery systems, academia, and communities of interest such as spiritual organizations and businesses. Shared responsibility among all individuals and all sectors of a community (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services/Public Health Emergency, 2011c) is discussed in the literature on disaster management with reference to the potential for enhanced capacity. For example, Savoia, Rodday, and Stoto (2009) noted how local departments of health that worked to organize coalitions were more likely to achieve their preparedness goals. As a nation, our understanding of preparedness has led us to a point at which there is conscious recognition that no one person or discipline either can or should be solely responsible for any part of the disaster management process (Jakeway, LaRosa, Cary, & Schoenfisch, 2008). The responsibility for preparedness, response, and rebuilding is complex and lies not only with the government, but with "active, engaged, and mobilized community residents, businesses, and nongovernmental organizations" (Nelson, 2007, p.S9). Nurses of all specializations, not only public health nurses, have demonstrated time and again a readiness and willingness to take on this responsibility as the historical and more contemporary exemplar previously noted illustrates. Public Health Nursing Public health nurses render care to individuals, families, and populations within designated systems and communities. The goal is to protect and serve, with emphasis on health promotion, disease and injury prevention, and risk factor identification. Public health nurses employ multiple strategies to accomplish these goals. These strategies include: surveillance, case finding, disease and health event investigation, outreach, screening, referral and follow-up, case management, delegated functions, health education, counseling, consultation, collaboration, coalition building, community organizing, advocacy, social marketing and policy development and enforcement (Wisconsin Department of Health Services, 2011). While public health nurses emphasize health promotion and disease prevention initiatives, this is not the limit of their activities. Public health nurses practice with an emphasis on care and protection of the public, and this includes times of disaster when they provide frontline care with regard to the core services of public health (Jakeway, LaRosa, Cary & Schoenfisch, 2008). All nurses, however, bear the responsibility of disaster response, not only public health nurses. In fact, the Code of Ethics for Nurses (2001) clearly articulates, in provision eight, that the nursing profession "is committed to promoting the health, welfare, and safety of all people" (p. 23) and that nurses have a responsibility "to be knowledgeable about the health status of the community and existing threats to health and safety" (p. 24). Consider a nurse working in a long-term care facility. What is this nurse's responsibility to the older adults living in the community when there is a hurricane? What is the nurse's responsibility when a wildfire threatens a group home for adults with developmental disabilities? What is the responsibility of home-care nurses who know that patients need them even though there is 13 inches of snow already on the 49