Study: Nurse-led, community-engaged initiatives improve care

Nurses across diverse roles and settings advance health equity by leveraging community-engaged strategies to address both immediate social needs, such as access to food, housing and transportation, and upstream needs such as combatting poverty, racism, environmental hazards and inadequate access to services, a scoping study found. Published in Nursing Outlook, the study found evidence for long-term or structural impacts remains limited, although short-term projects show improvements in access, engagement, trust and local leadership capacity. The authors say future research should clarify the sustained and structural effects of nurse-community partnerships and organizational and policy conditions to facilitate nurse-community partnerships. They call for dedicated nursing roles to address social factors affecting health, protected time for building relationships with communities and organizational structures to support multisector collaboration. (Nursing Outlook article, 6/8/26)