Primary Health Care Nursing

Primary Health Care Nursing

What is primary health care?

Primary health care refers to nursing practice where health care providers offer first level contact with individuals, families or communities. Depending on the city or country, primary health care nursing can incorporate health promotion to help prevent illnesses by engaging in personal care and development in the community. Other issues include: community empowerment, principles of equity and access to best health care. In addition, primary health care involves understanding the economic, social and political issues concerning health. Based on scope of practice, primary care nurses are committed to providing universally accessible, socially acceptable, and scientifically sound first level care.

How to become a Primary Care Nurse

It is important to underscore the fact that a primary care nurse works in a primary health care setting. Firstly, a primary care nurse has to be skilled in many of the basic procedures of nursing. Even though this kind of nursing deals in a wide range of medical issues since in most cases most medical problems are minor like cold and allergy. To this extent, the first step towards becoming a primary care nurse is by firstly earning a nursing diploma or degree. After this attainment, a nurse will have to excel in the National Council Licensure Examination for the registered Nurses. After all these attainment, certification in a specific field can also be obtained through a specific nursing field.

The Roles of Nurses in Primary Care

The role of primary health care nurses varies depending on an area of specialty. However, the general roles include; promotion of health care services, prevention of illness, antenatal and postnatal nursing as well as community development. Other roles are education and research, policy development and advocacy and also child and family health nursing. Recent research shows that primary health care nurses also offer patient care, organizer, quality controller as well as improvement agent, an educator as well as an agent of health care connectivity. It is important to underscore that most roles vary depending on specialty of any nurse.