Partnering with a sister city organization for an international service-learning experience

Community-Informed Health Promotion to Improve Health Behaviors in Honduras

BACKGROUND

Honduras is the second poorest country in Central America. The already high burden of disease is disproportionately worse among individuals with less education and limited access to health care. Community engagement is needed to bridge the gap in health care resources with the need for health promotion and education. Culturally relevant health promotion activities can foster transcultural partnerships.

PURPOSE

The purpose of this study was to partner nursing students with village leaders to assess a community's health needs and implement health promotion activities in Honduras.

DESIGN

Participatory action research was used in the study.

METHOD

U.S. nursing students ( n = 4) partnered with a nonprofit organization and community partners in Villa Soleada to interview mothers in Villa Soleada, a Honduran village of 44 families, and implement health promotion activities targeted to the health priorities of their families.

RESULTS

Structured interviews with 24 mothers identified gastrointestinal issues, health care access and quality, and malaria as the top three priorities. Ninety-two percent of respondents were interested in nurse-led health promotion. Activities engaged new community partners.

DISCUSSION

This partnership and learning model was well received and sustainable. The U.S. nurses involved in the partnership gained exposure to Honduran health issues and led locally tailored health promotions in Villa Soleada. The community's response to health promotion were positive and future activities were planned.

IMPLICATIONS

Nursing student's immersion experiences to support population-based health activities in low-resource settings are a replicable model that can help build healthier communities with a sustainable local infrastructure. Transcultural nursing experiences enhance students' perspectives, increase personal and professional development, strengthen nursing students' critical thinking skills, and for some students, confirm their desire to practice in an international arena.

Core principles for developing global service-learning programs in nursing

Global service-learning enables nursing to develop its role in promoting global health and enabling vulnerable and marginalized global communities to develop their own capacity for growth and development. Global service-learning requires good planning that is based on sound best-practice principles. Drawing on the growing body of literature on service-learning, the authors outline and discuss seven key principles that can usefully guide global service-learning. These are: are compassion, curiosity, courage, collaboration, creativity, capacity building, and competence. These principles can form the basis for ethically sound program development, offer a means of standardizing program development, and provide common criteria with which to evaluate a program's success.

Global Service Learning Project Influences Culturally Sensitive Care

Global service learning opportunities provided nursing students with the opportunity to experience a health care system that was unfamiliar to them and to interact with health care providers within that system. Service learning is a part of professional education that allows students to demonstrate their ability to apply and synthesize knowledge while it sharpens nursing students’ critical thinking skills. Faculty and students from a southeastern university combined a global health care experience with an integrated research—service learning project targeted at “needed services” in a rural Russian primary care clinic. The purpose of this global service learning project was to (a) offer nursing students a global health care learning experience and (b) examine the prevalence of components of the metabolic syndrome among the population of Kuzmolovsky, Russia, through screening activities. Students, with the help of a translator, conducted teaching sessions based on screening results. Programs were planned in advance and careful consideration was paid to treatment recommendations that would be readily available in Russia. Kuzmolovsky health care providers were so enthusiastic that faculty and students were requested to return. Students found that the global experience increased their self-confidence and that it offered insight into providing culturally sensitive care when working with populations from different cultures.

Application of a partnership model for transformative and sustainable international development

There are differences of intent and impact between short-term and long-term engagement of U.S. academic institutions with communities of need in developing nations. Global health programs that produce long-term transformative change rather than transient relief are more likely to be sustainable and in ethical harmony with expressed needs of a region or community. This article explores characteristics of successful ethical partnerships in global health and the challenges that threaten them, introducing a consensus community engagement model as a framework for building relationships, evolving an understanding of needs, and collaboratively developing solutions and responses to priority health needs in underserved regions of the world. The community engagement model is applied to a case study of an initiative by a U.S. school of nursing to establish long-term relationships with the nursing community in the Caribbean region with the goal of promoting transformative change through collaborative development of programs and services addressing health care needs of the region's growing elderly population and the increasing prevalence of noncommunicable chronic diseases. Progress of this ongoing long-term relationship is analyzed in the context of the organizational, philosophical, ethical, and resource commitments embodied in this approach to initiation of transformative and sustainable improvements in public health.

International Nursing Exchange Programs

International nursing programs provide a venue for nurses from many countries to have a dialogue about nursing practice, education, and research. This article provides an overview of a comprehensive international nursing program at a large academic medical center. Two aspects of the international nursing program are addressed: hosting international nurse visitors and facilitating visits of U.S. nurses abroad. The history, objectives, selection of participants, and design of the program are described. A retrospective review of outcomes of the international program is provided based on feedback from participants.

Capturing a Vision for Nursing

An urgent need to secure additional community health placements provided initial motivation to use alternate clinical settings. Subsequent student requests for placement in these settings, rather than the traditional community settings, drew attention to the sites' unique and far-reaching benefits. Presenting the findings of a qualitative study, the authors discuss the perspectives of students, instructors, and RNs regarding their experiences in these alternative clinical settings and provide recommendations for the use of alternative settings in nursing education.

Creating an international nursing practice and education workplace

In today's global workplace, both nursing practice and education need to promote international health. Nurses from a comprehensive 373-patient-bed hospital at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and faculty from the College of Nursing, University of Cincinnati, in southwest Ohio have successfully collaborated to develop several unique international nursing exchange programs. The goals of these programs are to increase cultural sensitivity and nursing knowledge relevant to a global community. The essential components used in creating and implementing the programs with Scotland, Honduras, and Korea will serve as an international workplace model for others, especially for those settings focused on children and family health care.

International nursing research and educational exchanges: A review of the literature

For more than 40 years, nurses have been involved in international programs and networks established to strengthen nursing education and research in developed and developing countries. After discussing international educational and research exchanges at the American Academy of Nursing's International Expert Panel, we reviewed the state of the literature about these collaborations to evaluate the results. MEDLINE and CINAHL were searched for papers between 1982-2003 on international nursing education exchange programs. The 79 papers identified and reviewed included, primarily, descriptions of or experiences with the exchanges. Most were written by faculty, even though most exchanges were for students. Most papers were written by persons from only one side of the exchange. Literature on this topic needs to begin including a theoretical basis and review of the literature; more research on and evaluation of the effects of these programs is needed.