Final answer:
The planning phase of community nursing is vital for shaping health interventions and includes analyzing data, prioritizing health problems, and setting goals. It culminates in the creation of a community nursing care plan, although it does not include evaluating whether objectives were met, which occurs in the evaluation phase.
Step-by-step explanation:
The planning phase in community nursing is critical for ensuring that health interventions are targeted effectively to meet the needs of the community. During this phase, nurses engage in several key activities that serve to shape their actions moving forward. This can involve an analysis of the data collected during the assessment phase, prioritization of problems identified, and the identification of immediate, intermediate, and long-term goals. However, determining if the objectives were met falls under the evaluation phase, not the planning phase.
For example, when addressing hypertension in a community, nurses might first analyze data on prevalence rates, then prioritize addressing the lack of local, affordable healthy food options as an underlying problem, and set a goal of reducing hypertension rates by a certain percentage over the next five years. This would all be part of the formalization of a community nursing care plan, which is essential to guiding interventions and ensuring that efforts are coordinated and effective.