Transatlantic Collaborations: Baccalaureate Nursing Students' Experiences of Participating in a Semester-Long Study Abroad Program.

AIM: The aim of this study was to describe students' experiences during a 15-week semester involving clinical placement in an Irish university. BACKGROUND: Internationalization is promoted and facilitated through study abroad initiatives within nurse education. Collaborations were developed between one university in the United States, an Irish university, and service partners. This study abroad initiative involved planning logistics, curriculum learning opportunities, and negotiating clinical placement in meeting state professional requirements. METHOD: A qualitative descriptive approach was used. Following ethical approval, 19 fourth-year students participated in focus group and individual semistructured interviews. Data analysis followed a thematic approach. RESULTS: Connecting our worlds details a process of acclimatizing, navigating learning, and using person-centered practices, illustrating meaningful learning in a journey of personal and professional development. CONCLUSION: Moving beyond the rhetoric of globalization is critical in future proofing initiatives in developing nursing practitioners while balancing potential safety risks in a post-COVID-19 era.

Comment

[...]in his year-end assessment of Brexit, Prime Minister Boris Johnson proudly highlighted a standards reversal as one of Brexit's signal achievements. Because the British government had rolled back its prohibition against using feet, inches, pints, and quarts, its centuries-old predecessor to the metric system, it was once again possible to produce Winston Churchill's beloved pint-sized bottle of whisky. The UKCA, some warned, might even provoke the kind of resistance that stalled the adoption of the metric system in Britain until its entry into the EU and led to a hybrid system of measurement in the United States. In other countries, especially the United States, where private industry seeking to make its investments more productive generated its own industrial standards using its traditional measurement system as a way of harnessing the forces of industrialization already underway, but also in the United Kingdom, and even in France where it originated, the metric system either was resisted or was rejected repeatedly. The acceptance of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) as a de facto standard for internetworking showed that the formal standards process could be an impediment to the next wave of industrialization, while circumventing the process offered advantages for governments and private investors alike.