Initiatives
Happy Health Workers — Amherst, MA — Nurses Culture of Health Alliance

The NCHA website will launch with a focus on Independent Nursing Practice:

A preview of paradigm change in healthcare.

Initiatives are the domain of a Community of Practice. When an RN joins NCHA as a Leader with an identified initiative, the initiative becomes the Domain of a Community of Practice.

Members of NCHA who join in the Practice designation are informed of initiatives and provided an abstract of initiatives that may be of interest to them. Nurses and Cross-sector collaborators work with the Leader of a chosen initiative to identify goals, objectives, outcomes and evaluation methods that demonstrate goal achievement.

Communities of Practice have their origins in apprenticeship learning, which also characterized early nursing education. Nurses and cross-sector collaborators who join NCHA at the Leader and Practice levels engage in the methodology utilized here to build a culture of health. Healthy culture refers to the habits and behaviors undertaken without thought that promote health and prevent illness. Primary prevention is intervention that occurs before health effects are evident in individuals, families or communities.

Methodology to Establish Primary Nursing Care Practices

To successfully fulfill the critical need to define, initiate and promote foundational ideas related to the responsibility of nurses for health promotion, illness prevention in all settings, a methodology known as Communities of Practice will be utilized by members of NCHA. Communities of Practice were originally used in apprenticeship models of learning. Such models characterized early nursing education and are therefore relevant to what is proposed here.

  • Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.
  • A Community of Practice has an identity defined by a shared Domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. Hence, they identify domains of interest to them and establish Communities of Practice.
  • Domain, Community and Practice are essential components of Communities of Practice and the Methodology for establishing primary nursing care practices. Community with each other to explore primary preventative, population-focused, community-based nursing practices.
  • Members of a community of practice are practitioners who develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems. In short, a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction. Practice is by practitioners. Incorporation into APRN standards within the scope of each APRN practice ensues.
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