Promoting the integration of primary care and public health.

This fourth paper in our health promotion examines how primary health-care nurses' position at the interface between lay and professional care makes them well placed to influence public health-care policy within the new culture of the NHS.

Using community health profiles to improve service provision.

Profiling has become increasingly important to the purchasing and provision of todays' health care. Kate Cernik and Mandy Wearne examine the concept and its importance to health visitors and community nurses and ask what is involved in the profiling process and who should be doing it.

Developing competency objectives as a basis for planning and assessing health visiting practice in training.

Evaluating student performance in health visiting practice is complex. This paper reports the development of a schedule which combines identification of learning needs, planning of learning experiences, implementation of student activities and the evaluation of student competencies for the fieldwork component of a Health Visitor Diploma. The schedule is intended to encourage students and community practice teachers to develop a shared approach to the planning of learning and the assessment of competence.