Assessing Community Empowerment for an Innovative Epidemiologic Approach

Abstract

Community empowerment can be a process, but also the result of nursing care. To analyze it as a result there is an instrument that allows to quantify its level in nine domains. According to Melo (2020), health centers can be considered communities, becoming the potential target of community and public health nurses care, especially in the public health unit. One of the main functions of a public health unit is the epidemiological surveillance of the population’s health state. However, traditional epidemiological surveillance is focused on diseases and Melo (2020) proposes a new approach for epidemiology focused on people in what concerns nursing diagnosis. The aim of this research is to identify the level of empowerment of four Portuguese primary healthcare structures, named as ACeS, so as to improve the epidemiological surveillance of nursing diagnoses. As methodology, we developed four focus group with all nursing leaders from all primary care units of the four ACeS, using the Portuguese version of the empowerment assessment rating scale. The results present the level of community empowerment of each ACeS according to the nine domains of the scale. The needs of intervention to improve the ACeS empowerment were also identified in order to develop the epidemiological surveillance of nursing diagnoses.

Nursing Epidemiological Approach of Hypertension Management in a Public Health Service from the Northern Region of Portugal

“…The rate of uncoded diagnoses needs to decrease to lower levels, even in this reality, considering of the totality of hypertensive patients, 17.7% can be potentially easily improved. The low community empowerment levels shown by our previous study in this issue [ 10 ] reveal the importance of empowering intervention by community and public health nurses to primary healthcare nurses as a whole regarding the epidemiological surveillance of nursing diagnoses.…”

“…All of these conditions are great opportunities to develop the post-modern epidemiology defended by Melo [ 5 ]. However, a recent study developed in this problem identified that primary healthcare structures in Portugal have a low level of empowerment to develop the epidemiological surveillance of nursing diagnoses, despite the good environmental and organizational conditions existing nowadays in the country [ 10 ].…”

“…The interrelation between these different health professionals, responding to local public health needs (although currently based more on disease than in health disease responses) demands an empowerment of primary healthcare communities to promote this new epidemiological approach. This process should be based on community partnerships that can be intentionally promoted by public health nurses [ 14 ] in a process of community empowerment to promote the epidemiological surveillance of nursing diagnoses [ 10 ].…”

Collective empowerment of an online patient community: conceptualizing process dynamics using a multi-method qualitative approach

“…This nursing model offers an integrative vision of stakeholders and local structures and provides a clinical decision matrix to guide nurses’ decision-making. Conceptual approach [ 40 ] and empirical approaches through a cross-sectional quantitative study (developed in a community of schools in Africa to address children’s nutritional status and eating behaviors - [ 41 ]) and focus groups (with four Portuguese primary healthcare structures to improve the epidemiological monitoring of nursing diagnoses – [ 42 ]). Community empowerment is approached as a dynamic process articulated around three components: - Community leadership related to the community’s knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, and wishes in the context of the problem addressed; - Community participation related to communication, partnerships, and the existence of organizational structures; - Community process related to community coping or experiences with the problem addressed.…”

Exploring the Emerging Trends of Spatial Epidemiology: A Scientometric Analysis Based on CiteSpace

“…Since the 1800s, geographic analysis has been used to characterize the transmission and possible causes of infectious disease epidemics (Elliott & Wartenberg, 2004). Many areas of spatial epidemiology, such as epidemic mapping (Paireau et al, 2018;Wesolowski et al, 2018), risk assessment related to point or line sources (McGill et al, 2019;Mercer et al, 2017;Solano-Villarreal et al, 2019), geographical correlation studies (Wang, Yin et al, 2019), and cluster detection and disease clustering (Al-Ahmadi et al, 2019;Melo et al, 2020), have made progress. In fact, a novel geographical agent-based simulation model was created to investigate the transmission of COVID-19 (Alvarez Castro & Ford, 2021).…”