Advocacy for elderly autonomy: a challenge for community health nurses.

Community health nursing practice has always been directed by a genuine concern for other persons. Flaherty (1980) wrote that the profession now, perhaps more than ever before, requires that nurses go beyond direct care and be involved with the nature and shape of the health-care system, the practice of all team members, and "the changing roles of consumers in the maintenance of their own health" (p.8). The ethics of care in a society that no longer values old age is a challenge that must be met head on by CHNs.