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Elizabeth has worked as a public health nurse (PHN) doing home visits on the maternal child health team for approximately a year. One day as she is having lunch with her co-workers, someone mentions that an outbreak of pertussis had occurred in an adjacent county. In fact, there are 42 cases! Two days later, Elizabeth's supervisor asks whether she can help the Disease Prevention & Control (DP & C) team investigate 10 probable cases of pertussis.
DP & C nurses operate the immunization clinic and work with infectious disease issues, such as tuberculosis. Other than these activities, Elizabeth knows very little of what their day-to-day work is like. Her supervisor explains that disease investigation is case management work. She will most likely not be required to do any additional home visits. (Sometimes follow-up visits are necessary when it is difficult to locate people.) She will need to plan on a limited amount of time to place phone calls, review records, and work with community partners, such as school nurses. Elizabeth agrees to take the additional assignment and arranges to receive orientation from the lead nurse. During this briefing, the lead nurse explains the state's data-privacy laws, the state health department's infectious disease reporting requirements for pertussis, and the report form that needs to be completed by the healthcare provider or the lab associated with the clinic for each suspect or confirmed case. This is a lot of new information!
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ELIZABETH'S NOTEBOOK: COMPETENCY #2 Utilizes Basic Epidemiological (The Incidence, Distribution, and Control of Disease in a Population) Principles in Public Health Nursing Practice
Understands the relationship between community assessment and health promotion/disease prevention programs, especially the populations and programs with which the PHN works
Understands the relationships between risk/protective factors and health issues
Obtains and interprets information regarding risks and benefits to the community
Applies an epidemiological framework when assessing and intervening with communities, systems, individuals, and families
Source: Henry Street Consortium, 2017
USEFUL DEFINITIONS Agent: The primary cause of the health-related condition. Agents are most often classified into six main types: physical agents, chemical agents, nutritive agents, infectious agents, genetic agents, and psychological agents (Valanis, 1999). [Note that the term infectious agent has been replaced with causative factors (Merrill, 2017, p. 11).]
Communicability: The ability of a disease to be transmitted from one person to the next; communicability is determined by how likely a pathogen or agent is to be transmitted from a diseased or infected person who is not immune and is susceptible (Merrill, 2017, p. 43).
Environment: Reflects the aggregate of those external conditions and influences affecting the life and development of an organism … physical, chemical, biological, and social factors that affect the health status of people (Merrill, 2017, p. 214); factors external to the human or animal that cause or allow transmission (p. 8).
Epidemic: Occurrence of cases of an illness, specific health-related behavior, or other health-related ...