New Opportunities for Nurses in Primary Health Care and Population Health

Authors

  • Nancy C. Edwards

Abstract

Primary health care (PHC) has been soundly adopted by the nursing profession as both an approach to service delivery and a basis for intriguing research questions. Over the past 25 years, several significant events have provided momentum for research in the field of PHC: the Alma-Ata Declaration of 1978, the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, and, more recently, initiatives in the field of population health. The Alma-Ata Declaration gave us pause to examine approaches to health-care delivery that ensure diverse populations access to basic health-care services. The tenets of the Alma-Ata Declaration continue to be put in place with international initiatives led by Canadian nurses. Current examples include a PHC training initiative in Vietnam led by Memorial University of Newfoundland; training for renewal in PHC being undertaken through a partnership between the Mozambican Health Ministry and the University of Saskatchewan; preparing the next generation of community health nurses in Ghana, an initiative led by the University of Alberta; PHC training programs in Pakistan and in a rural area of South Africa, initiatives led by faculty at Caster University; and participatory training for grassroots maternal and child health-care workers in China and the design of decision support tools for PHC in Chile, projects led by nursing faculty at the University of Ottawa. These international projects funded by the Canadian International Development Agency provide opportunities for the involvement of Canadian nurses in innovative PHC design and evaluation. It may be timely to consider how we might better use these

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Published

2016-04-13

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Section

Articles