Visiting Nurse Service is integral part of primary healthcare in Croatia and it is present within each Community Health Centre in the Republic of Croatia. Visiting Nurse Service thus organized is equally available to all residents and completely free of charge.
Photo: Dinka Baric
Its role is to encourage state of staying healthy and improvement of health, especially in the most vulnerable stages of life, such as pregnancy, newborn and infant age. They also support families in particular situations and circumstances, such as chronic illness, disability, old age or poor social situation (vulnerable groups).
Support is carried out by visiting nurses with graduate studies in nursing degree that provide healthcare to users outside the healthcare institutions. Upon a call by the user himself or a general practitioner, maternity ward, hospital request or simply by visiting nurse herself, should she recognize a need that her help is needed to certain families while working in the field, she visits their homes.
Visiting nurses are involved, in addition in health and education work that provide people in their local community where they provide education through lectures and activities in running self-protecting clubs (hypertensives, diabetics, treated alcoholics) and groups (breastfeeding support group).
Goal to these educational activities, as part of primary and secondary prevention, is to empower and educate people to take care and control of their own health.
Visiting nurse purpose and role is impact residents on creating healthy lifestyles, which will give them a basis for good health and prevention of chronic disease development.
For those prevention activities where influencing others on changing habits and attitudes is required, takes some time. Because of that, sometimes it seems that nursing service does not give the expected results.
It is therefore important to develop programs with evaluations of what has been done in certain phases, and thus make nursing service an objective result review.
