Public Health Nursing's Impact on Strengthening Community Resilience

• Published in: American journal of public health (1971) Vol. 112; no. S3; pp. S224 - S225
• Main Author: Waters, Catherine M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Public Health Association 01.06.2022
• Subjects: Absorptivity; Applications programs; Citizen participation; Community; Community Health; Community involvement; Cooperation; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; Drug use; Health promotion; Humans; Intervention; Mental health; Mobile computing; Nursing; Opinions, Ideas, & Practice; Pandemics; Public Health; Public Health Nursing; Public Health Practice; Public private partnerships; Resilience; Strengthening; Substance use; Visiting nurses; United States > US; San Francisco California
• ISSN: 0090-0036; 1541-0048
• DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2022.306873

Although there is not a universal definition of community resilience, research indicates the positive impact resilience can have on a community's health and quality of life, particularly if it is bolstered and buffered by accessible, equitable, and sustainable systems.1 The collective resilience of an already strained public health system was tested during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning with the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service in 1895, public health nursing was envisioned by Lillian Wald and Mary Brewster to promote community resilience, in cooperation with multisectoral private-public partnerships, by meeting people where they are without blaming them for their problems.2Two articles in this supplement demonstrate the impact of public health nursing practices and policies on strengthening community resilience at multiple levels of influence: adaptive (ability to adjust), absorptive (ability to cope), anticipatory (ability to predict and be proactive), and transformative (ability to transform systems to deal with change and uncertainty).3 Guided by the Community Resiliency Model, Duva et al. (p. S271) describe the impact of a nurse-led public health intervention designed to meet population mental health needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. In partnership with cross-sector entities in Georgia, nurses trained the public to build community resilience capacity against stress from adversity or trauma. Guided by the Public Health 3.0 and communitybased participatory frameworks, Austin et al. (p. S275) describe a communityvalidated mobile application that provided actionable data to communities to address substance use during the COVID-19 pandemic, shifting the focus of the communities from a deficit-based approach to a strength-based or resilience approach.