Effective community engagement ensures that everyone involved participates and can share their opinions by facilitating efficient communication, respect, and trust. Professional nurses must ensure they engage effectively with patients, families, and community members at different levels (Tambo et al., 2021). Effective engagement provides nurses with the chance to address and solve challenges, such as socioeconomic issues affecting communities. These issues, if left unresolved, foster many health problems. When nurses participate in community engagement, they help improve the overall health of community members. Among the most effective levels of engagement that nurses can provide in communities are:
Community engagement at an individual level: This level entails having personal sessions with individual community members. At this level, nurses can share their health knowledge with individuals through casual interactions and conversations. It enables them to listen and have a clear understanding of the challenges affecting the community members. This helps the nurses develop suitable healthcare plans and education information that best suits individual community members (Tempietto et al., 2019).
Community engagement at the family level: At this level, community health nurses engage with families by conducting comprehensive assessments to identify potential challenges and risk factors affecting families. The assessment helps nurses plan and create effective health education and interventions that address different families’ health concerns and challenges. Additionally, through family interactions, family nurses will be able to design and implement interventions uniquely tailored to fit the values and beliefs of individual families, making the recommended interventions easily accepted (Tambo et al., 2021).
Community-level engagement: Community nurses can volunteer in their community and engage in consultations, interactions, and collaboration with members of the communities. They can achieve this by performing health screenings, participating in blood drives, and checking on older adults who stay alone. This will help them identify significant health issues that need to be addressed in order to offer effective access to the lacking resources, such as medication and relevant health education that resolve the issues (Tambo et al., 2021).
Community engagement at the education level: Community nurses engage with communities at this level to offer them essential health education on specific health topics. Additionally, they provide education on health threats and risk factors, such as unhealthy lifestyles and their effect on communities (Tambo et al., 2021). This enables the nurses to empower communities and influence them to observe and make better health choices. This also helps to enhance the health literacy of the community members.
Health policy and advocacy engagement level: This level is also significant in community engagement. At this level, community nurses attend forums and participate in discussions that address health concerns that affect communities. This allows them to address health issues and concerns by advocating for policy changes that suit the needs of the communities (Tempietto et al., 2019).
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