Janice E. Hawkins

Wikicountries: enhancing global health awareness without leaving home.

Nursing programs are challenged to prepare students to provide culturally sensitive care to increasingly diverse populations and ‘‘to practice in a variety of healthcare settings.’’ Nurse graduates must be equipped to deliver holistic, patient-centered care whether practicing at home or around the world. For our students, the world has become a much smaller place. The availability of instant and continuous worldwide news and information has increased exposure to global issues. As well-traveled nursing faculty with extensive global nursing experience, we believe that increasing global health awareness is the first step to better equip nursing students to practice in our own communities and abroad. Students express interest in this content but are limited in their ability to participate in costly study-abroad experiences. Global health content has been identified as an essential component of baccalaureate education, but only 21% of nursing programs define global health content in their curricula. To address this need, we developed a Web-based course to increase global health awareness in undergraduate nursing students. This course uses innovative wikitechnology as a teaching/learning tool allowing students to ‘‘travel’’ to other countries without leaving the comfort of their computer chairs.