2022/06/01 by Shawn M. Kneipp, Joyce K. Edmonds, Jennifer Cooper +5 · 2 citations
Health Professions · #Food Security and Health in Diverse Populations #Public Health Policies and Education #School Health and Nursing Education
paper · doi:10.2105/ajph.2022.306782
openalex publication_date 2022/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recent national initiatives in nursing and public health have emphasized the need for a robust public health nursing (PHN) workforce. In this article, we analyze the extent to which recent national enumeration surveys base their counts of this workforce on the definitions, scope, and standards for practice and practice competencies of the PHN nursing specialty. By and large, enumeration surveys continue to rely on practice setting to define the PHN workforce, which is an insufficient approach for meeting the goals of major nursing and public health initiatives. We make recommendations for the development of new standards for PHN enumeration to strengthen the broader public health infrastructure and evaluate PHN contributions to population-level outcomes. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(S3):S292–S297. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2022.306782 )