ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the concept of the nurse as empowerment facilitator from a community-action perspective and thus health as a social product. As with the nurse as empowerment facilitator from an individual-action perspective, the focus is on process as much as on outcome and a bottom-up locus of control but, as can be seen in the health promotion framework in Chapter 5, on micro population interventions. Intervention is concerned to facilitate a community-led agenda and nurse-community partnership-based practice for collective health gain. A number of ways of working under the auspices of community development aiming to build social capital and capacity, together with community advocacy emanating from a radical humanistic premise and associated socio-political values, are discussed. The chapter also focuses on indicators and practical (i.e. not ideological/theoretical) examples of the health promotion aims, processes, impact and evaluation criteria and outcomes of this contemporary model of ‘new’ public health practice for nurses, to demonstrate the theory-practice relationship and help bridge this gap.
