Health care crisis in the black community: challenges prospects, and the black nurse.

The Black community, particularly in major urban settings, is faced with escalating social, economic, and life-style problems, which threaten the life and well-being of current and future generations of Black people in crisis proportion. The rising number of deaths due to heart disease and stroke, homicide and accidents related to substance abuse, AIDS, cancer, and infant mortality are among the leading culprits. They interfere with prospects of longevity, joblessness, poverty, and homelessness and further complicate the crisis. These problems have implications for the practice of nursing. The magnitude of the problems dictate the need for modifications in the health care delivery system and how future practitioners of nursing are educated. The inextricable role of the community, although often underaddressed, in solving its own problems is among the promising strategies for resolving the crisis. Black nurses, in particular, must accept the challenge and the opportunity to test innovative and sensitive interventive strategies which will enable the Black community to emerge from the complex and haunting problems which threaten well-being.