It's important to remember
that public health nurses
see the community
as their client.
So what is a community?
A community is a collection of
people who interact with one another
and whose common interest
form the basis for a sense
of unity or belonging.
In order for a community to exist,
there are three requirements.
First, you need people, you cannot
have a community of just one person,
you need a group of people
to form a community.
Next, you need a place for those people to
gather, a place for them to be together.
This could be a physical
space or a virtual space.
And finally, there needs to
be some sort of interaction
between the people
and the community.
This is most often interaction related
to a common interest of some sort.
So again, we need three
things to form a community,
people, place, and interaction.
When we talk about communities,
it's important to understand that there
are three different types of communities.
First, we have a geographic
or geopolitical community.
Next, a common interest or
and then a community
So let's take a look at each
three of these in detail.
let's start with geographic
or again, what we sometimes
call a geopolitical community.
This is the type of community
that's defined by a physical area.
So think about where you live.
Now imagine a map,
the area that you would
circle on that map
to define your community is
your geographic community.
For me, I draw a circle around
the street that I live on.
There are several families on my street
who frequently interact with one another.
And we care about keeping
our street clean and safe.
We are a geographic or
The next type of community is
a common interest community.
You may also hear this referred to
as a phenomenological community.
This is a community that's defined
by a special interest or a goal,
but can't necessarily be
defined by a physical space.
So you can't circle this
kind of community on a map.
Think about the communities
that you're a part of.
What about your
nursing school cohort?
For many nursing cohorts,
the community all has a common goal,
a goal to graduate
from nursing school.
And they have a space to gather,
whether that's on campus or virtually.
But the members of that cohort may
live in different parts of the city,
or maybe even different
parts of the country.
That's an example of a common interest
or phenomenological community.
The third and final type of
community is a community of solution.
A community of solution is
a group that comes together
to address a specific problem.
A group that comes together
to find a solution.
Are you a part of any
communities of solution?
I'm a part of several.
I recently just joined the
nurses climate challenge.
This is a community of
nurses and nursing schools
who are committed to finding
a solution for climate change.
We are a community of solution.
As nurses working
in the community,
we often look at the populations
we work with in different ways.
these are all words that you commonly
hear in public health nursing,
and they have some similarities,
but they're different.
And those differences
So let's look at each of them.
we just defined a community.
Remember, these are groups of
people who have a space together
and interact with
each other regularly.
A population is a group of people
who occupy a specific space.
Now, this differs from a geopolitical
or geographical community.
Because the people in a population do
not have to interact with each other,
they simply coexist.
So for example,
I live in the state of Illinois,
I'm a part of that population.
And then we have aggregate.
The word aggregate is used to
define a group of individuals
who can be considered as a whole and
are loosely associated with each other.
They share a common characteristic,
but they may or may not interact.
The feature by which you define the
aggregate is what the focus becomes.
So for example,
people within the same age range
within the same age
group are an aggregate.
Pregnant and parenting teens are
another example of an aggregate.
So by definition,
communities and populations
are actually types
Again, these are words that are
commonly used in public health nursing,
and sometimes interchangeably.
But I challenge you to really
consider your word choice
and use the correct sometimes overlapping
word for the group that you're describing.