ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: A partnership between three nursing programs, multiple high-needs public school districts and a local asthma coalition was developed as a way to build shared capacity aimed at improving health outcomes for children with asthma. This article explores student perceptions of their clinical experiences teaching asthma self-management within a regional cross-sector, community-based, multi-site academic-practice partnership. DESIGN: Nursing faculty from three Long Island, New York-based nursing programs within the partnership jointly created a qualitative focus group methodology to more fully understand the phenomena of interest. A set of open-ended interview questions guided the sessions. SAMPLE: Through purposive sampling, 42 undergraduate nursing students participated in 60-min focus group sessions. MEASUREMENT: Focus group data were transcribed. Content analysis, coding, and theme development was carried out collaboratively. The unit of analysis was the individual participant responses informed by group interaction. A researcher diary was maintained. RESULTS: One overarching theme and three sub-themes emerged from the data, reflecting student understandings in the areas of positioning, professional/personal identity, and social awareness. Ongoing analysis revealed patterns across the data sets linking student learning and the goals, milieu and workings of the partnership. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that the context of a thriving community-based academic-practice partnership, established to improve population health outcomes, offered unique clinical learning opportunities for students through exposure to the values, ideas, and innovation of the partnership itself.
Subject(s)
Asthma/therapy , Community Health Services/methods , Education, Nursing, Baccalaureate/methods , Focus Groups/methods , Students, Nursing/psychology , Child , Community Networks , Humans , New YorkABSTRACT
In this article, we describe what we expect will be a substantive transformation in health sciences education: Health Sciences Online (www.hso.info). HSO is the first website that delivers authoritative, comprehensive, free, and ad-free health sciences knowledge. It is a portal to the best health sciences knowledge, and the foundation of what we expect to be the most accessible, high-quality health sciences university. This article describes the site and the resources currently available through HSO, and our plans for further development of this resource.
