Opportunities and challenges in nursing are boundless and ever-changing. You have spent a lot of time and effort learning how to care for individual patients in medicalsurgical and other acute-care oriented nursing specialties. Now you are entering a unique and exciting area of nursing— community/public health. As one of the oldest specialty nursing practices, community health nursing offers unique challenges and opportunities. A nurse entering this field will encounter the complex challenge of working with populations rather than just individual clients, and the opportunity to carry on the heritage of early public health nursing efforts with the benefit of modern sensibilities. There is the challenge of expanding nursing’s focus from the individual and family to encompass communities and the opportunity to affect the health status of populations. There also is the challenge of determining the needs of populations at risk and the opportunity to design interventions to address their needs. There is the challenge of learning the complexities of a constantly changing health care system and the opportunity to help shape service delivery. Community health nursing is communitybased and, most importantly, it is population-focused. Operating within an environment of rapid change and increasingly complex challenges, this field of nursing holds the potential to shape the quality of community health services and improve the health of the general public.