Donna M. Nickitas

Community as Client: Reaching an Underserved Urban Community and Meeting Unmet Primary Health Care Needs

In a collaborative effort to address the health disparities within 1 urban underserved community, the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing, Hunter College, and the Mount Sinai Medical Center organized a health fair. Nursing faculty worked side by side with undergraduate nursing students to offer several health promotion activities, screening, and educational sessions for residents of East Harlem, New York. In addition, nursing students provided individual patient education on nutrition, hand washing hygiene, medication review, and glucometer usage. Educational materials on lifestyle issues (sample meals, maintaining normal blood glucose, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and smoking cessation) were provided. To help bridge the gap between health education and health promotion activities, nursing students, many of whom were bilingual, served as translators for non-English speaking Spanish and Chinese residents. In addition to the new professional partnerships developed, new clinical placements for nursing students were established.

Teaching home care electronic documentation skills to undergraduate nursing students.

ABSTRACT Although there is general consensus that nursing students need knowledge and significant skill to document clinical findings electronically, nursing faculty face many barriers in ensuring that undergraduate students can practice on electronic health record systems (EHRS). External funding supported the development of an educational innovation through a partnership between a home care agency staff and nursing faculty. Modules were developed to teach EHRS skills using a case study of a homebound person requiring wound care and the Medicare‐required OASIS documentation system. This article describes the development and implementation of the module for an upper‐level baccalaureate nursing program located in New York City. Nursing faculty are being challenged to develop creative and economical solutions to expose nursing students to EHRSs in nonclinical settings.

Psychometric Evaluation of the Service-Learning in Nursing Inventory

AIMThe aim was to develop an instrument to assess undergraduate nursing students’ experience of service-learning to reveal benefits and identify service-learning as a professional value that leads to civic and social responsibility. BACKGROUNDService-learning is a teaching and learning approach that integrates academic learning with experiential community-centered foci. It provides structured opportunities for reflection on broader social and cultural dimensions of health. There is no valid and reliable instrument to measure service-learning experience of nursing students. METHODA psychometric evaluation was conducted through item analysis, validity, and reliability. RESULTSFace validity agreement was 80 percent; the content validity index was adjusted until 1 was achieved for each item. Two factors explained 58.64 percent of the total variance. Cronbach’s &agr; was .940 for the skills subscale and .932 for the personal insight subscale. CONCLUSIONThe inventory demonstrated strong psychometric properties. Future research should focus on replication on diverse populations.