COMMUNITY HEALTH ISSUES

FOCUS

The role of communitybased nurses in health promotion
Dean Whitehead
Dean Whitehead is
Lecturer,
Faculty of Health,
School of Nursing,
University of Hull, East
Riding Campus, Hull

art of the ongoing process of National Health
Service (NHS) reforms involves bringing about fundamental change in the way that primary health care is delivered in the UK (Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS), 1987;
Department of Health (DoH), 1989a, 1996; Standing
Nursing and Midwifery Advisory Committee
(SNMAC), 1995). A considerable amount of discursive and legislative documentation has accompanied these reforms, which served to provide a ‘springboard’ for debate on current and future directions of health-related policy (DoH, 1989b, 1993a,b, 1997,
1998). There has also been a concerted and longstanding request for community nurses to adopt and incorporate both health promotion and educational activities into their workload.
In the late 1980s, in its document Promoting
Better Health: the Government’s Programme for

P

ABSTRACT
It is the responsibility of all nurses to incorporate health promotional and health educational activities into their professional roles.
Much of the literature around this issue relates to the specific role of community-based nurses in the primary healthcare team, and identifies their unique position and responsibility for pioneering the universal acceptance and adoption of health-promoting practices.
Community-based nurses are in a good position to commission health-related activities and integrate them into practice
(Department of Health and Social Security, 1987; Department of
Health, 1992, 1996). On the basis of this, one might expect that the results of studies in this area would identify evidence of good understanding, adoption, parity and support for such initiatives
among