The Division of Community Nursing of Central South University can be traced back to the family visits in 1911, which was part of the nursing education of Xiangya Unisex Nursing School. In the middle of the 1980’s, the course of community nursing was made available as an elective by the Nursing class of Hunan Medical University. In 1995, community nursing became a compulsory course of the undergraduate major of nursing in our university, before a research office for community nursing was established in 1996. In 2000 and 2005, our division gained the right of conferring master degrees and doctorates of community nursing.

Currently the curriculum of our division is a complete education system encompassing undergraduate and postgraduate education. Our division consists of 5 full professors, 2 professors, a distinguished professor from Yale University, 3 doctor tutors, 4 master tutors, 1 post-doctor and 4 doctors, who edited or co-edited more than 40 textbooks including “Community Nursing”, “Practical Community Nursing”, “Community Nursing: Theories and Practice”, “Skills for Community Nursing”, etc., and we also have multiple practical teaching bases such as Mayuan Ling and Wangyue Lake.

In recent years, our division has undertaken more than 30 research projects concerning educational reforms and community nursing, of which 9 are based on international collaboration, 1 funded by Chinese Postdoctoral Science Foundation, 1 funded by the Doctoral Foundation of Ministry of Education, 2 funded by Provincial Foundation of Natural Sciences, 19 recognized as Province Level Research Programs, with a total funding of 2 million RMB. The responsible person for the course, Professor Guoping He, is the first doctor tutor in Community Nursing in China. He sponsored the Ministry of Education doctoral fund project "Research on my country's Community Nursing Curriculum System and Talent Cultivation Mode", which was supported by the American Chinese Medical Foundation's "Diversified Approaches to Develop Community Nursing Education in Hunan Province" project. At present, our research group has published more than 170 teaching and research papers, including 12 papers included in SCI. At the same time, our Department of Community Nursing was listed as a key construction major in Hunan Province in 2001. It was rated as a school-level quality course in 2005, a Hunan Province quality course in 2006, and a National Quality Course in 2013.