nursingforsocialjustice

Last August I attended a nursing philosophy conference. One of the speakers was PhD student from UVic. Their background was public health. They were talking about the importance of public health nursing, and the erosion of public health funding because of difficult to assess outcomes like prevention of disease spread. Well, 6 months later, here we are experiencing a pandemic.

I think one of the most important things happening is this Covid-19 situation is that we are also understanding how prepared each country is in their response to a pandemic. I suspect that many people in Canada have already had Covid-19, and many more have it than are being tested. This pandemic may not have originated in China. The contact tracing from the first patient that led to the first testing got it from somewhere, and there were many racist kind of assumptions from a North American perspective.

One of the learnings that I hope will emerge from this is that we are not as prepared as we need to be. More resources are necessary to put into public health, especially with fast and wide scale spread that can be prevented by hand washing. Perhaps it is time to review the benefits of having nurses in public schools and larger public health units in communities. Perhaps it is time for a consolidated, EHR that contains immunization history and supports surveillance.

Peace,

Michelle D