Addressing Nursing Student Understanding of Health Care Transitions Through a Cross-Course Writing Assignment.

ABSTRACT: Caring for patients with chronic health conditions and providing them appropriate transitional care that provides positive outcomes and decreased rehospitalizations is essential in today's heath care environment. Nursing students must learn to think critically and communicate effectively in order to provide appropriate transitional care. This pedagogical challenge may be met in part by implementing a cross-course writing assignment that combines the concepts of chronic illness and community health as an effective tool to teach students about transitional care, stimulate critical thinking, and improve writing competencies.

Integrating mental health connections in community academic partnerships.

BACKGROUND: Community academic partnerships (CAPs) connect students to interprofessional collaborations and expand clinical experiences beyond traditional settings. Serious and persistent mental health problems represent an important action area within population health. Mental health disorders across the lifespan are often co-morbid with substance use, poverty, and community violence. AIMS: This article describes CAPs in a community course where students impact vulnerable populations while learning new roles and responsibilities. The process explains student engagement with the community, and using best practices for care of community, population health concerns, and mental health and well-being. METHODS: We initiate and maintain collaborative relationships that guide culturally sensitive responses to health and illness. Four well-established CAPs' exemplars describe the interventions and outcomes. RESULTS: Students successfully integrated a variety of health promotion and mental health interventions within the CAPS clinical environments. The Socio-Ecological framework is used to articulate student outcomes. CONCLUSION: The CAPs are a dynamic system requiring ongoing maintenance and response to evolving epidemiological issues, such as increased incidence of alterations in mental health. The educational innovation provides an opportunity for students to understand aspects of holistic health in a community environment as they intervene at individual, relationship, community, and societal levels.

Self-Efficacy and Nutrition Education: A Study of the Effect of an Intervention with Faith Community Nurses.

The faith community provides an important access point for practice focused on population health at a time when health issues such as obesity and overweight are affecting large number of Americans. The purpose of this study was to examine faith community nurses' self-efficacy perceptions following a nutrition educational intervention. A convenience sample of 92 faith community nurses were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The t-distribution analysis revealed significant differences between the nutrition knowledge self-efficacy (p = .016) and nutrition counseling self-efficacy (p = .010) post-test scores for the experimental and control groups. This type of educational intervention provides a model to be used with faith community nurses as they integrate faith and health in this setting.

Improving the process of community-based student nurse practice through a high-fidelity simulated clinical experience.

Simulation can be used to facilitate knowledge and practice with clients/families in the community. Because student nurses appreciate the opportunity to practice skills in a nonthreatening environment, and faculty welcome the opportunity to observe all students providing a home visit to a similar type of client, the authors developed such a simulation. In this article, they outline the process taken to develop and evaluate a high-fidelity community simulated clinical experience.