Ohio Community Health Research Paper

1599 Words7 Pages
Ohio Community and Public Health
NUR/408

Ohio Community and Public Health
As health care progresses, community and public health nursing has continued to evolve from providing basic needs to delivering advanced health care to: individual patients, families, and entire communities. By focusing on a single patient or a community nurses can practice health promotion for an entire population. This integration of such skills are very difficult and not only aid individuals and communities but are also relevant to the entire wellbeing of public health as a whole. Even though public health has been around since the establishment of the United States; most citizens do not realize how long community and public health nurses have been practicing
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Public health first went on record in 1601, when the Elizabethan Poor Law was written. This law, which was based on Great Britain’s health care model, and “guaranteed medical care for the poor, blind, and “lame” individuals, even those without family” (Stanhope & Lancaster, 2008, p. 24). As the United Stated grew so did public health. Some of America’s milestones in public health include: the establishment of the American Public Health Association in 1872, the Public health nursing program was instituted at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York in In 1910, and finally the Public Health Nursing textbook was written by Mary S. Gardner in 1919 (Stanhope & Lancaster, 2008). The history of public health in Ohio, yield incomplete results. There was no information on when the Seneca County Health Department was established, but the establishment of the Ohio Department of Health occurred in 1886 (Ohio Department of Health: History of public health, 2012). The HHS has a very rich history that began in “1798 with the passage of an act for the relief of sick and disabled seamen, which established a federal network of hospitals for the care of merchant seamen, a forerunner of today’s U.S. Public Health Service” (HHS: Historical Highlights, para. 44). To put this date into perspective the HHS was founded during the Presidency of George Washington. In retrospect the HHS has been around as long as the United States has had a formal government. One major event that the HHS played a vital role in was the Great Influenza of 1918. Billings (2005), states “during this global pandemic the public health department distributed gauze masks to be worn in public as well as implemented restrictive measures for the safety of the public” (para. 9-10). Although the CDC is widely known, unlike the HHS its’ heritage could be viewed in its’ infancy by comparison. According to the

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