Chair's Message
Greetings and welcome to a challenging and exciting New Year!
A vision for the PHN Section emerged from our Annual Meeting in Boston only achievable through the engagement, dedication, and innovation of our membership. Our challenges are outlined by our PHN Section Strategic Priorities: Ensuring social justice; Eliminating health disparities; Strengthening the public health work force; actively Engaging students; and Promoting environmental health. I am excited in the knowledge that we are the right people to make this vision a reality. The strategic priorities that drive the PHN Section do so because they reflect our basic values. Our Annual Meeting in Boston reflected these priorities, and our “Town Meeting” energized us in a way that I have seldom seen at an Annual Meeting. You demonstrated a passion for public health nursing’s leadership in the area of human rights. We cannot have a healthy population when many live in poverty, without education, and are threatened by environmental hazards. Each quarter we will briefly discuss one or two of our section’s strategic priorities. This quarter we begin with social justice and two key related questions. What are the social determinants of health? What are the fundamental causations of illness?
Social justice is a core value of public health and public health nurses. The focus at our recent APHA Annual Meeting was on human rights. In session after session, we listened to and participated in discussions addressing the need to improve human rights within the United States and beyond our borders. When we examine the social determinants of health, we see that poverty is a leading cause of ill health. We must address global poverty if we are to have a chance at improving the health of populations. Social justice is one of the Public Health Nursing Section’s primary motivators to action. Lillian Wald, a public health nursing pioneer in social justice, dedicated her life’s work to improving the lives of vulnerable populations. We must embrace Lillian’s fervor for social justice and work to address social determinants of health. In the United States, three important policies that need addressing are raising the minimum wage, a universal health care/single payer system, and early childhood education. Without adequate income, health care and education, people do not have control over their own social determinants of health. Public health nurses can be effective change agents in the policy arena by rekindling the passion that initially brought us into public health. What might seem overwhelming at first begins to seem achievable when we think globally yet act locally. Already, we can observe that many of our own municipalities and states have begun to do so. Public health nurses are positioned strategically to influence and support these policies by raising awareness, participating in the political process, empowering the disenfranchised, and promoting social justice.
I invite you to send us your perspective on human rights – a quote, phrase, definition, short essay or other composition of your choice. These contributions will be compiled into a book titled, “Perspectives on Public Health Nursing and Human Rights,” and posted on our Web site. In the next newsletter, we will begin with a discussion on “eliminating health disparities.” I would like to take this opportunity to thank graduate students Hartley Feld, Peggy Tiller, Tammie Bertram, Jennifer Hunter, Lois Davis, and Genie Prewitt at the University of Kentucky who wrote topic briefs for each of our priorities. I will draw from their materials as we progress through each priority. We are forming work groups for each of the priorities. Each work group will serve as a catalyst into action, and will work to develop principles similar to the environmental principles already developed by the Environmental Health Task Force. If you have an interest in a specific priority, please send me your name and e-mail address, and we will include you in the appropriate work group.
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PHN Section Chair Debra Anderson leads a group at the 2006 PHN Town Hall at the 134th APHA Annual Meeting in Boston. |
by Debra Gay Anderson, PhD, APRN, BC
Section Chair
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Emergency Preparedness & Sustainable Food Sources:
Public health emergency preparedness experts assert that in a large-scale emergency, transportation interruptions are a distinct possibility and may result in severe food shortages within a matter of days. I hope that we, as public health nurses, will challenge ourselves to be actively involved in encouraging and developing sustainable and local food sources to help communities prepare for emergencies and minimize their adverse effects.
In the past 50 years, we, as a populace, have become increasingly removed from our food sources. We can recall, however, the Victory Gardens of World War II, when over 20 million urban and rural Americans responded to the national food shortage by planting small gardens that supplied over one quarter of the vegetables produced in the United States. There is a grassroots local food movement happening today, but it must rapidly expand in order to serve as the basis for a sustainable emergency food network. Some of the elements of this movement include state and regional sustainable farming groups, community supported agriculture shares (CSA’s), farmers’ markets and metropolitan buying clubs that connect urban/suburban families with individual farmers, and school lunch programs that are returning to home cooked and locally grown food.
In addition to the urgent emergency preparedness issues, public health nurses are ideal educators and advocates for sustainable and healthy food sources because we have a broad view of health promotion and disease prevention. Some of the benefits of local organic food include:
· Reduced exposure to harmful pesticides, herbicides and hormones in food from plants and animals;
· Better nutritional value from organic produce and animals allowed to feed on their own natural food, for example grass-fed beef;
· Reduced dependence on fossil fuels due to the elimination of lengthy travel from farm to consumer and reduced need for large scale agricultural equipment;
· Buffering of our food supply vulnerability where there is local crop diversity;
· Increased connectedness in communities and neighborhoods that occurs naturally in the process of procuring locally produced food.
What can nurses do to get involved in this effort? First, find some healthy local/regional food sources for yourself and your family. One excellent guide is “Local Foods: Where to Find It, How to Buy It,” available from the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Minnesota (www.misa.umn.edu). Then talk to other nurses about how to fit your action ideas into practice in your particular work and community settings.
by Linda L. Halcón, PhD, MPH, RN
Associate Professor
Chair, School of Nursing’s Integrative,
Global & Public Health Co-operative
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
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Promoting Public Health
The Cape May County, New Jersey Health Department offers a broad array of services, but the general population is unaware of our existence. A simple, inexpensive fix for this is to empower the public health nurses to speak up about their programs. A perfect opportunity presented itself when the county Women’s, Infants and Children’s (WIC) office needed speakers for their monthly regional meetings. Public health nurses from the Childhood Lead Poisoning Program, Special Child Health, Cancer Education and Early Detection and the Family Planning Program prepared 30-minute overviews of their programs. They gathered informational brochures and practiced their presentations. Of course, public speaking is nobody’s favorite endeavor, but speaking about what you are an expert on is the best way to get started. The series was a hit.