shared values

when i study at night i teach my partner about how our bodies work in beautiful synchrony: the complementarity of structure and function, synergistic skin layers, the "fluidity" of bone.... when he studies at night, he teaches me about socioeconomic presuppositions, therapy techniques and a variety of case studies about social discontinuities. so i got to thinking about the intersect of our course work; rob is studying the social structure and i am studying the human structure. and they are not so different. both vocations focus on care of the whole person using creative, individualized therapy. both "ologies" have basic knowledge available to anyone with access to wikipedia and both have intensely deep philosophies for those curious enough to ask. both afflict rich and the poor, black and the white, gay and straight.

specifically, public health nurses must make moral decisions regarding practice in complex situations fraught with competing moral claims. nurses have practiced within a context of ethics since the beginning of professional nursing in the 19th century. the impetus for the professionalization of nursing found expression in the nightingale pledge in 1893 and the subsequently suggested ethical codes that led to the first formally adopted code in 1950. ethical codes, in nursing as in other professions, serve not only to define such groups as professional as opposed to occupational, but also to outline primary duties, responsibilities, and obligations. the most recent revision of the american nurses association's ethical code include provisions and standards that address human rights duties and obligations.

public health has been defined as what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the conditions for people to be healthy. this definition, which stresses the societal responsibility for the health promotion of the population as a whole, raises an important question about the scope of public health. is public health responsibility confined to the prevention of the immediate causes of injury and disease, or should public health be more concerned with the alleviation of the larger social and economic problems that have an impact on health and disease, such as poverty, violence, and inadequate housing?

(A Critical Intersection: Human Rights, Public Health Nursing, and Nursing Ethics; Advances in Nursing Science: October/December 2007 - Volume 30 - Issue 3)