Health Protection and Peace Promotion: The Role of Public Health Nurses

Background: Ongoing conflicts map, shows that currently 62countries are affected by war and its immediate and long termhealth results. War influences on children s health and infantmortality rates also causes lots of mental and physical disordersand sanitation problems among its victims. Peace and health areinter-related because curative tasks of health workers in wars hasmade them take part in a special way to peace-building. Nursesare at the first line of working directly with vulnerable populationin war and post-war times. Their roles specially in public healthnursing (PHN) such as advocator, care giver, decision maker,educator, counselor, researcher, manager and communicator, cancause them to participate in the field of inter-relation of healthprotection and peace promotion through focusing on preventionof war and its effects. Aim of this study is to discuss about theroles of public health nurses in health protection and peacepromotion trough prevention of war s mal-health-effects.Methods: In this systematic review article data collected bysearch data sources PubMed, EMBASE, the Cochrane Library,Scopus, CINAHL, using common keywords related to nursingrole in peace promotion or war prevention and then selectedrelated article published between jun2010to 2018.Finding: PHN activities could be focused on three steps ofprevention to prevent hostile health effects of war in societies;Prevent to develop conflict through broadcasting the codes ofethics and peace between countries (as primary prevention),treating immediate adverse health conditions and preparingthemselves proactively for deployment to a conflict zone (as secondary prevention) and rehabilitating damages and long-termproblems (as tertiary prevention).Conclusion: PHNs can protect health through promoting peaceamong populations by focusing on three levels of prevention inwars. Curriculum planners and medical science instructors shouldpay special attention to teaching students related topics.

Keywords:

health , nurses , peace , prevention , public health