If you want to become a community health nurse, you’re in luck — you can work in government and private agencies, clinics, and other private settings, including online community venues. You can work with individuals, families, groups, community leaders, teachers, parents, and physicians in community health education to help improve the overall health of a community — and, depending upon your health interests, you can choose to educate those communities about health disease prevention, nutrition and childcare as an option in your nursing career. The following list of 40 informative forums on community health and community health nursing can provide you with clues on how communities, both online and on the ground, care about the health of their neighborhoods.
National Forums
- AOL Health Community Message Boards: Users can find numerous options for health community communications at this site, from cancer to other specific illnesses.
- Clinical Connection: This message board is for individuals to discuss health, illnesses, medicine, and clinical trials.
- Dialogue4Health: Dialogue4Health is a social network dedicated to creating healthy communities where people can live, work, and play.
- Farm to Community Health Out Reach: These discussions are meant for families who live (or try to live) more holistic and natural lifestyles.
- HealthBoards Message Boards: This site contains message boards that relate to just about every health topic available, from abuse support to women’s health.
- Health Community, Tools & Advice: MSN offers a health community, health tools, and health advice.
- HHS.gov/Open: Look to this site for various forums that are held online at specific dates and times.
- iVillage Health & Fitness: Pick a topic and join the conversation. Topics range from diet plans to crisis support and from coping with addiction to psychology.
- Med Help Forums: You have two forums to choose from in this format, including “Medical Support Communities” and “Ask a Doctor” forums.
- Medscape Public Health & Prevention: Medscape from WebMD offers specialists, primary care physicians, and other health professionals the Web’s most robust and integrated medical information and educational tools.
- Public Health Forums: This is a consumer-driven Web site created by a company that provides natural and herbal care products.
- The Health Forum: This is a health and wellness discussion board where you can share and discuss all your Health and Wellness related issues and concerns.
- WebMD Communities: Select from hundreds of WebMD Communities or create your own to talk with others about just about any health issue.
- WEGO Health: “If online health communities are an unruly high school, then Health Activists are its dedicated teachers — and WEGO Health is the teacher’s lounge.”
Topic-Specific Forums
- ChronicBabe: If you’re a “sick chick, ” ChronicBabe offers hundreds of resources designed to help you keep on being a “Babe,” even with chronic illness.
- Diabetes Hands Foundation: A world where people touched by diabetes and their loved ones do not feel alone. The mission is to connect people touched by diabetes and to raise diabetes awareness.
- Disabled World: This site provides a number of options for disability chat rooms, message boards nad messenger programs.
- Geriatric Health Management Forum: This website is a social network and discussion forum for geriatric health professionals, researchers, academics and students.
- Health Informatics Forum: Anyone can join this open discussion focused on various activities for HIT professionals.
- Long-Term Conditions Network: This community could be of interest to clinicians, allied health providers, managers, course leaders, community health workers and consumers from Australia, New Zealand and beyond.
- Rethinktalk: Rethink Mental Illness, the leading national mental health membership charity, works to help everyone affected by severe mental illness recover a better quality of life.
- Susan G. Komen for the Cure Forums: The global leader of the breast cancer movement provides an informative Web site and forums for individuals to connect.
- The Sober Recovery Community: From alcoholism and drug addiction, dual diagnosis, abuse and trauma, overeating, gambling, codependency and more, this forum covers addictions from all angles.
- Under Age Drinking: Get advice from professionals and other parents on way to protect your children from the risks of under age drinking.
Organizational and Public Health Forums
- Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Community Forum: AHRQ’s goal is to identify useful and effective ways to engage stakeholders and the general public in AHRQ Programs.
- American Public Health Association Forums: Forums are free to APHA members and may be joined at any time.
- Association for Medical Imaging Management Forum: This members only discussion group enables real time dialogue among imaging professionals through AHRA’s website or via email.
- Community-Public Health Nursing: Ultimate Nursing offers a forum specifically geared toward community nurses.
- Insight Live: This is a multi-media interactive site for those interested in FHI 360, a global development organization with a rigorous, evidence-based approach.
- New Public Health: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation created a community forum designed to spark an ongoing conversation about public health challenges, opportunities, evidence, solutions and innovations.
- Planning Healthy Communities: This online forum provides a place where stakeholders in the public health, planning, and allied fields can to come together, share information, and discuss important issues related to topics at the intersection of planning, public health and sustainability.
- School Nurse Forums: Sign in to School Nurse and participate in the many forums available to nurses in the public school system.
- The Society for Public Health Education: Membership in SOPHE affords many rights and privileges to valuable information, resources, and networks to enhance your health education research and practice.
- The Center for Sustainable Development: Develop projects from the ground up, learn management, attract donors and have fun collaborating with colleagues from around the globe.
- Workforce Management Community Center Forums: Connect with workforce management and human resource professionals in one of these topic-focused forums.
Local Forums
- Augusta Health Community Health Forum: This forum brings community agencies, health care providers, and interested citizens together to identify and address health care needs in the Shenandoah Valley region, Virginia.
- How Healthy is the Capital District: This forum focuses on the Healthy Capital District Initiative (HCDI), a state-mandated community health assessment for the capital region of New York.
- NC Community Health Forum Series: Through it’s Community Health Forum series, the Institute for Emerging Issues initiated an effort to get communities across North Carolina thinking about strategies to bolster the healthcare workforce.
- Second Opinions Community Health Forums: This is a series of interactive, multi-media community meetings offering balanced information and practical solutions to health care concerns to residents in Sacramento, California.
- The Center for Faith and Community Health Transformation: This is a joint project of Advocate Health Care and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Neighborhoods Initiative.