Thus, major concepts and activities necessary to address environmental factors that can affect the health of individuals and populations are within the scope of practice and definition of nursing set forth by the ANA.

The nursing process, consisting of assessment, diagnosis, planning/outcomes, intervention, and evaluation, has been described as the core and essence of nursing, central to all nursing actions. It is a deliberate, logical, and rational problem solving process whereby the practice of nursing is performed systematically. The nursing process includes continuous input from patients, their families, or communities through all phases from assessment to evaluation. Diagnoses, planning, and interventions may be altered at any stage based upon new information from the patient or any other source. As far as possible, the patient should have an active and equal role in the nursing process, constricted only by physical or emotional limitations on their ability to participate.

It is worth noting that the nursing process was developed for the care of individuals, and has since expanded to include a role in the care of families and communities. Application of the nursing process to environmental health issues may require nurses to employ various phases of the process in new ways. For example, the intervention may be recommending a change in the source of drinking water that affects a whole neighborhood or community. The process is compatible with the framework of investigator, educator, and advocate, established by the California Public Health Foundation (1992) to address nursing roles and responsibilities particular to environmental health issues. The CPHF framework augments rather than duplicates the nursing process.

During the assessment phase of the nursing process, data are gathered to determine a patient's state of health and to identify factors that may affect well-being. This activity includes eliciting a health history to identify previous illnesses and injuries, allergies, family health patterns, and psychosocial factors affecting health. Environmental health components of history taking can be integrated into the routine assessment of patients by including questions about prior exposure to chemical, physical, or biological hazards and about temporal relationships between the onset of symptoms and activities performed before or during the occurrence of symptoms. During an assessment, the nurse should be alert to patterns of co-morbidity among patients, family members, and communities that are indicative of environmental etiologies. Nurses also conduct assessments during visits to patients in their homes and places of work, gaining first hand information about environmental factors that may adversely affect health.