Advancing population-based health-promotion and prevention practice in community-health nursing: key conditions for change

Community-health nursing practice is a pivotal aspect of present-day health reforms. In Quebec, Canada, the recent introduction of a population-based approach has entailed increasing the resources allocated to health promotion and disease prevention. Semistructured interviews were conducted with nurses and managers (N = 69) in an effort to understand how these new resources are reflected in nursing practice. Three classes of factors emerged as key conditions for change: contextual and historical, training and professional-development, and work-organization factors. The authors propose courses of action respecting these conditions to provide support for community-health nursing practices that incorporate a contemporary population-based approach.