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Excerpt
How are faculty helping students prepare for practice in ever-changing settings? One option is to add ambulatory, convalescent, chronic, and preventative-education experiences that are not usually components of adult nursing courses. Unfortunately, many of these experiences are observational in nature. Observation does not provide the equivalent of an active, participatory, hands-on clinical experience.
A literature review revealed minimal information about how professional nursing education addressed this concern. Only one program described community-based experiences as part of an adult nursing course in an associate degree program. Faculty accompanied students on home visits. 4 Brodsky 5 reported a design of a postpartum follow-up home visit as part of the maternal-child clinical course. In Brodsky’s program, junior students made 2 home visits to assess the health status of the newborn and the mother, and to provide and reinforce education. A student would be assigned to the mother on one visit, and to the newborn on a subsequent visit.
Could similar experiences be integrated into an adult nursing clinical course? In the generic baccalaureate program at Purdue University School of Nursing, community care is part of the traditional public health/community nursing senior level course. Students also make posthospital visits as part of the maternal-child nursing clinical course. The goals of adult nursing faculty were to introduce junior students in adult nursing to community care, assist the student to view the client as a member of the larger community, and assist students in transferring previously learned knowledge from the acute-care setting to the community setting. To meet these goals, a follow-up posthospital visit project was designed.
