Community health nursing in an urban day care center

This paper has endeavored to depict some of the student achievements during community health nursing practice in a less traditional clinical setting, a day care center for infants and toddlers. There appear to have been a number of advantages to such a clinical placement. For one thing, students had the opportunity to devise a package of preventive/maintenance health services for a specific group of healthy children. This they were able to implement in collaboration with the day care center staff and the children's families. In the course of delivering the health services, they learned firsthand the strategies inherent in planning and negotiating among one another. In recognition of the integrity of child health as a component of family health care, they accounted regularly to the parents in both individualized and group fashion. Through the experiences over the course of the quarter, there seemed to be a heightened awareness of the potential for innovative nursing practice in urban communities.