Types of Communities (Nursing)

00:01 It's important to remember that public health nurses see the community as their client.

00:05 So what is a community? A community is a collection of people who interact with one another and whose common interest or characteristics form the basis for a sense of unity or belonging.

00:19 In order for a community to exist, there are three requirements.

00:22 First, you need people, you cannot have a community of just one person, you need a group of people to form a community.

00:30 Next, you need a place for those people to gather, a place for them to be together.

00:35 This could be a physical space or a virtual space.

00:39 And finally, there needs to be some sort of interaction between the people and the community.

00:44 This is most often interaction related to a common interest of some sort.

00:48 So again, we need three things to form a community, people, place, and interaction.

00:55 When we talk about communities, it's important to understand that there are three different types of communities.

01:01 First, we have a geographic or geopolitical community.

01:05 Next, a common interest or phenomenological community, and then a community of solution.

01:11 So let's take a look at each three of these in detail.

01:15 First, let's start with geographic or again, what we sometimes call a geopolitical community.

01:21 This is the type of community that's defined by a physical area.

01:25 So think about where you live.

01:27 Now imagine a map, the area that you would circle on that map to define your community is your geographic community.

01:34 For me, I draw a circle around the street that I live on.

01:37 There are several families on my street who frequently interact with one another.

01:41 And we care about keeping our street clean and safe.

01:44 We are a geographic or geopolitical community.

01:48 The next type of community is a common interest community.

01:51 You may also hear this referred to as a phenomenological community.

01:56 This is a community that's defined by a special interest or a goal, but can't necessarily be defined by a physical space.

02:03 So you can't circle this kind of community on a map.

02:07 Think about the communities that you're a part of.

02:10 What about your nursing school cohort? For many nursing cohorts, the community all has a common goal, a goal to graduate from nursing school.

02:18 And they have a space to gather, whether that's on campus or virtually.

02:22 But the members of that cohort may live in different parts of the city, or maybe even different parts of the country.

02:28 That's an example of a common interest or phenomenological community.

02:33 The third and final type of community is a community of solution.

02:37 A community of solution is a group that comes together to address a specific problem.

02:42 A group that comes together to find a solution.

02:45 Are you a part of any communities of solution? I'm a part of several.

02:49 I recently just joined the nurses climate challenge.

02:52 This is a community of nurses and nursing schools who are committed to finding a solution for climate change.

02:58 We are a community of solution.

03:02 As nurses working in the community, we often look at the populations we work with in different ways.

03:07 Community, population, aggregate, these are all words that you commonly hear in public health nursing, and they have some similarities, but they're different.

03:16 And those differences are important.

03:18 So let's look at each of them.

03:21 Now, we just defined a community.

03:23 Remember, these are groups of people who have a space together and interact with each other regularly.

03:30 A population is a group of people who occupy a specific space.

03:35 Now, this differs from a geopolitical or geographical community.

03:38 Because the people in a population do not have to interact with each other, they simply coexist.

03:44 So for example, I live in the state of Illinois, I'm a part of that population.

03:50 And then we have aggregate.

03:51 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.

03:58 They share a common characteristic, but they may or may not interact.

04:03 The feature by which you define the aggregate is what the focus becomes.

04:07 So for example, people within the same age range within the same age group are an aggregate.

04:12 Pregnant and parenting teens are another example of an aggregate.

04:18 So by definition, communities and populations are actually types of aggregates.

04:23 Again, these are words that are commonly used in public health nursing, and sometimes interchangeably.

04:28 But I challenge you to really consider your word choice and use the correct sometimes overlapping word for the group that you're describing.