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Indirect care refers to nursing decisions, actions, or interventions that are provided
through or on behalf of individuals, families, or groups. These decisions or
interventions create the conditions under which nursing care or selfcare may occur.
Nurses might use administrative decisions, population or aggregate health planning,
or policy development to affect health outcomes in this way. Nurses who function
in administrative capacities are responsible for direct care provided by other nurses.
Their administrative decisions create the conditions under which direct care is
provided. Public health nurses organize care for populations or aggregates to create
the conditions under which improved health outcomes are more likely to occur. Health
policies create broad scale conditions for delivery of nursing and health care (AACN,
2004, 2006; Suby, 2009; Upenieks et al., 2007).

Preparedness: The readiness of the nation’s medical and public health infrastructure to
respond to and recover from disasters and public health emergencies. Preparedness requires
collaboration with hospitals, healthcare coalitions, biotech firms, community members, state,
local, tribal, and territorial governments, and other partners across the country to improve
readiness and response capabilities.
Primary and secondary data: Primary data is collected by an investigator for a specific purpose.
Secondary data is collected by someone else for another purpose (but being utilized by the
investigator for another purpose).
Profession: An occupation (e.g., nursing, medicine, law, teaching) that is not mechanical or
agricultural and requires special education.
Professional agility: The power to move quickly and easily; the ability to think and draw
conclusions quickly drawing on intellectual acuity.
Professional development: Taking purposeful action to engage in structured activities to advance
career development, education, leadership, program management, and/or compliance initiatives.
Professional identity: The representation of self, achieved in stages over time during which
the characteristics, values, and norms of a profession are internalized, resulting in an individual
thinking, acting, and feeling like a member of the profession (Cruess et al., 2014).
Quality Improvement (QI): A process that uses data to monitor the outcomes of care processes.
QI uses improvement methods to design and test changes to continuously improve the quality
and safety of health care systems (Cronenwett et al., 2007).
Resilience: The ability to survive and thrive in the face of adversity. Resilience can be developed
and internalized as a measure to improve retention and reduce burnout. Building positive
relationships, maintaining positivity, developing emotional insight, creating work-life balance,
and reflecting on successes and challenges are effective strategies for resilience building.
Response and recovery in an emergency/disaster: Identifying resources and expertise in
advance and planning how these can be used in a disaster. Preparedness, however, is only
one phase of emergency management. There are four phases of emergency management:
mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.

THE ESSENTIALS: CORE COMPETENCIES FOR PROFESSIONAL NURSING EDUCATION 63