APPLICATION OF PUBLIC HEALTH TOOLS IN COMMUNITY HEALTH NURSING Aside from the biophysical and social sciences, community health nursing also synthesizes in its practice the concepts, knowledge and skill. s der-ived from public health. The population and wellness emphases of public heallh are the same essential features of community health nursing. Tools in measuring and analyhing community health problems such as epidemiology and biostatistics were :. ipplied to form part of our assessment tools in the diagnosis of communily health nursing problems. TI1e health disciplines of demography, vital statistics and epidemiology a-re three important tools that help the nurse in identifying the commun ity's health needs. DEMOGRAPHY More than just being aware of how large a population is in a community, the nurse also needs to comprehend the characteristics of the population that makes t J1e people vulnerable to certain health condition s. She can determine the nature and magnitude of existing and potential communily health nursing problems if she possesses knowledge about the population's size, composition and distribution in space. Demog. rapby, the science of population helps the nurse find reasons or rationale why or how a particular population or group is influenced by a variety of factors resulting in vulnerability to diseases. Demography is the science which deals with the study of the human population's size, composition and distribution in space. Population size simply refers to the number of people in a given place or area at a given time. \'\/'hen the population is characterized in relation to certain variables such as age, sex, occupation or educational level, then the population compos ition is being dcsc:ribed. The nurse also describes the spatial distribution or how people are distributed in a specific geographic location. The three events descn'bed above are affeqted depending on bow fast or bow slow people are added to the population as a result of births, deaths and migration occurring in the community. Sources of Demographic Data Demographic information can be obtained from a variety of sources but the most common come from censuses, sample surveys and registration systems. Census is defined as an official and periodic enumeration of population. During the census, demograp hic, economic and social data are collected from a specified population group. These data are later collated, synthesized and made known to the public for the purpose of determin ing and explaining trends iu terms of population changes and planning programs and services. There are two ways of assigning people when the census is being taken. The de ju. re method is done when people are assigned to the place where they usually live regardless of where they are at the time of the census. On the other hand, when the de facto method is used, the people are assigned to the place where they are physically present at the time of the census regardless of their usual place of residence. Since the census asks for a complete enumeration of the population, it is usually a very expensive undertaking. It will requi:re money to pool together people and other 179 