Public health nurses work of individual or family settings within the population or community. With the knowledge and skills they have, they have to improve the health quality of them, focus on health maintenance and health education. They can work in home health agencies, public health departments, health maintenance organizations, public health clinics, occupational health facilities, school environments and even private offices.  Public health nurses make plan, implement, develop, and evaluating the population health statistics for betterment of the health quality of the people in an area. The medication they may do in public health nursing is giving immunizations or health education events within a community. Hence, public health nursing certification may help the public health nurses to broaden their knowledge and competencies in reaching the utmost effort for taking control every health issue in the mentioned are above.

Before the public health nursing certification, some of nurses may take some courses to get the certificate of when they are holding active and valid registered nurse license and meet some requirements, they can take public health nursing certification exam for pursuing the certificate. In the public health nursing course, there are some mandatory courses to be taken. Those courses will be useful for their future practice as public health nurse in the society. Those are such as:

• Educative nursing system
• Health assessment
• Family system nursing
• Nursing system issues and ethics
• Community health nursing and lab
• Study of disease
• Community development
• Epidemiology
• Demographics
• Biometrics
• Community development
• And some other courses relate to public health nursing 

Instead of taking a course for the certification, public health nursing certification is also can be taken by joining an examination. However, some requirements or step to be taken is more tiring. Some general steps for taking the examination:

• Possessing a registered nurse registered number.
• Complete some forms and application for the examination.
• The exam taker candidates follow up some procedure until the examination day.

Not to mention, every step for taking public health certification exam must be precisely followed to be successfully registered for the examination. With the certificate granted, those objectives, desire to help and give health care service or medication to the people in needs, and experience of public health nurses practice, they are able to help people in larger environment more than in hospital. However, since public health nursing certification is not financially supported by some parties of government or public health departments and such, this certificate pursuit is voluntarily done by noble public health nurses.