Community Empowerment and Community Partnerships in Nursing Decision-Making

Community empowerment has been studied as a process and result phenomenon throughout the last 40 years. Community partnership, which has been studied during the last 20 years, has been identified as a key process to promote intervention and research within communities. In this paper, we introduce the relation between these two concepts, from the research that is being developed at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Health Research (CIIS) in Universidade Católica Portuguesa. We comment on the available evidence regarding community partnership and community empowerment within the Nursing Decision-Making process. There is a particular focus on Community Health Nursing Specialists (CHNS) and the aim to promote the identification of CHNS as potential community partnership developers within society. It is also important to analyze how community partnership processes are intentionally integrated as a nursing intervention within the nursing process. This analysis should occur from the nursing diagnosis to the evaluation of health gains in communities sensitive to CHNS care in a Nursing Theoretical Model developed from a Nursing PhD process—the Community Assessment, Intervention, and Empowerment Model.