Advanced practice nursing in community: nursing's opportunity

This article explicates the concept of community as the relational processes that constitute a coming togetherness and explores the role of advanced practice nursing in community. Community as process and health as process are described from the theoretical perspectives of Parse's nursing theory of human becoming and Newman's theory of health as expanding consciousness. Advanced practice nurses, in engaging with community, participate in a nurse-person-community-health process. This engagement occurs in the reality of managed health care. The focus of advanced practice nursing in community is health, wholeness, and quality of life. To participate with presence in the nurse-person-community-health process is viewed as nursing's opportunity.