Newswise — Public Health Week, April 7-13, annually highlights health promotion, disease prevention, and early intervention, but for the faculty and students at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing (JHUSON), every week is public health week. Hopkins nursing faculty and students are part of a health care revolution changing the lens through which health and illness are viewed, moving from the microscope of acute individual illness to the larger prism of community public health. The JHUSON promotes a vision that looks beyond today's illness treatment system toward a health care system and—working through the SON Department of Community Public Health—ensures the concepts of health promotion and illness prevention are taught and thrive. According to Department Chair and Professor Phyllis Sharps, PhD, RN, CNE, FAAN, "Community-based public health education and promotion have been central to nursing for generations. And at last, the importance of this work has been growing in health care policy and programs. It's an approach that will be good for everyone's health, not just their illnesses, and nursing is at the heart of the transformation." Through its community nursing centers, the Department and the School create partnerships that build health and hope in urban Baltimore communities and offer tomorrow's nurses life-changing public health-centered experiences.
Getting Safe, Keeping Safe: Public Heath and Intimate Partner Violence—Helping women who are victims of intimate partner violence (IPV or what once was called "domestic violence" ) is one of the most critical steps a community-based nurse can take to promote the public health. Unchecked, IPV results in injury, even death, among its adult victims; emotional repercussions can resonate for years. Adults aren't the only victims; so are their young children, many of whom develop serious long-term physical and behavioral problems. Nurses can help avoid further damage and promote healthier lives by working with IPV victims and their children as early as possible.
The challenge today is identifying the very best ways to reach out to and assist abused mothers and their young children and to put those methods into practice nationwide. With the help of a $3.5 million grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research, JHUSON faculty member Phyllis Sharps, PhD, RN, CNE, FAAN, aims to respond to that challenge by assessing the effectiveness of the Domestic Violence Enhanced Visitation Program (DOVE), a community-based intervention using structured one-on-one home visitations with nurses to help break the cycle of domestic violence. Working with a test population of 360 mothers and infants, the program works to increase women's awareness of IPV, recognize the dangerousness of their relationships, and identify options to improve safety. While outcome data for DOVE are months away, Sharps is hopeful: "We know home visitation works," says Sharps. "Through this program we work with women to help them make plans and mobilize resources to stay safe and to keep their babies safe. We have the potential to improve the health of a significant number of women who experience intimate partner violence during pregnancy and to help the 3-10 million children who witness this violence each year."
Once is Enough: Public Health Partnering for Safe Injection Practices—More than any other health professional, nurses promote health and work to prevent illness, whether screening for potential health problems, promoting immunization, or advocating hand-washing to prevent disease transmission. Nurses now are battling to stop the practice of reusing syringes, and not just among injection drug users. Syringe reuse is a growing issue for people of all ages being treated in settings outside hospitals by health care personnel who fail to follow basic infection control practices. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over the past decade unsafe injection practices by U.S. health care professionals have potentially exposed more than 60,000 patients to life-threatening hepatitis B or C. One such patient, Evelyn McKnight, infected with hepatitis C because her health care provider reused syringes, has a special connection to Hopkins Nursing. Her friendship with a JHUSON alumnus led to a meeting with Dean Martha N. Hill, PhD, RN, FAAN; a meeting that had long-lasting results: McKnight created HONOReform, a national advocacy organization to make injection procedures safe for all patients, and JHUSON nursing students made a commitment to help achieve that solid public health goal through both practice and policy. In February of this year, a delegation of Hopkins students and faculty met with members of Congress to advocate for the important health reforms needed to help ensure syringes and other medical instruments are used once and only once. The group joined McKnight and other members of the Safe Injection Practices Coalition as well as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, other members of Congress, and federal health officials to launch The One and Only Campaign, a national public health campaign to re-educate health care providers and patients about safe injection practices." The experience helped me feel empowered as a plain citizen and advocate for important legislation," says Ellen Porter '09. Her classmate Alyson Stolba agrees. "It was rewarding to feel that we might be making a change. Everyone we talked to was so receptive." As important to the students as the opportunity to advocate for a solid public health policy, most felt they could make an even greater contribution after graduating by working to achieve a change in the culture of all community health settings to adopt the principle that, when it comes to syringe use, once, and only once, is enough.
The Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing is a global leader in nursing research, education, and scholarship. The School and its baccalaureate, master's, PhD, and Doctor of Nursing Practice programs are recognized for excellence in educating nurses who set the highest standards for patient care and become innovative national and international leaders. Hopkins is the only nursing school in the country with a baccalaureate Peace Corps Fellows Program and is ranked at the top of the enrollment rankings for colleges and universities that are Peace Corps Fellows/USA partners. Among U.S. nursing schools, the Hopkins community public health nursing master's program is ranked second by U.S. News & World Report; the nursing graduate programs overall are ranked fourth. Each year, the School's nursing research program and faculty achieve placement among the top 10 in nursing schools for securing federal research grants and for scholarly productivity. For more information, visit http://www.nursing.jhu.edu.
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