In the Community

Students in the Community
Service Learning Courses

Faculty accomplishments in community service are congruent with the mission, philosophy and goals/objectives of the program and with professional nursing standards and guidelines. Members of the Nursing Department provide service contributions that include professional and community affiliations. Individual faculty serve as advisors, lecturers, consultants, or board members for a variety of local agencies.

Examples of community activities include:

• Advisor and lecturer to Dracut Public Schools HIV and Teen Pregnancy Prevention Committee.
• School Health Advisory Board, Belchertown Public Schools.
• Advisory Board Member, Eastern Mass. Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders Association, Greater Lowell Office.
• Board of Governors, Saints Memorial Medical Center.
• Board of Directors, HealthQuarters, a service provider for women's reproductive health to under served populations.
• Board of Directors - D'Youville Senior Care Corporation; Board of Directors - Family Services of Greater Lowell.
• Service providers at Open Door Free Clinic, Hudson; Student Health Services at UMass Lowell. 

Students in the Community

In the fall semester, Nursing juniors and seniors are assigned to group placements at over 60 sites. Seniors may have the opportunity to complete a practicum in which they are paired individually with clinical preceptors. Graduate students have one-to-one preceptorships with nurse practitioners during their three clinical practicums. Each semester the program places 140 undergraduate and 22 graduate students in clinical sites.

A placement database is maintained consisting of approximately 200 agencies where students have been placed. Most relationships are long-standing, but new partnerships are initiated upon students and faculty request.

Nursing placement sites range from Cape Cod to Maine. They cover all of Massachusetts and much of New Hampshire. Sites include clinics, schools, doctors’ offices and Veterans Administration facilities. Graduate nurse practitioner and undergraduate students perform internships at Lowell Community Health Center. A variety of students are placed at Lowell General and SMMC. Other nearby clinical sites include UMass Memorial Health Care Center, Children’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, New England Medical Center, Holy Family Hospital, Lawrence General Hospital, Anna Jacques Hospital, and Emerson Hospital.

The UMass Lowell Nursing program has a strong focus on health promotion and clinical placements include community-based sites as well as acute care settings. For example, one clinical course focuses on health promotion of young families including childbearing women, infants, children, and adolescents. A portion of the clinical experience consists of  the student establishing a relationship with a family and assessing their coping over the year. Nursing students also participate in community-based programs, like health promotion with healthy kids at Head Start.

Clinical placements engender good publicity for UMass Lowell Nursing. The presence of students in the field helps to recruit RNs to the University’s Degree completion program or the graduate program and LPNs and nurses aides to the undergraduate nursing programs. Both graduate and undergraduate students are usually recruited and offered positions in agencies where they had preceptored placements.

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Service Learning Courses

A Service Learning approach is especially fitting for training students in the multiple roles of the professional nurse, who serves as advocate, teacher, and consultant. Service learning can be one component of clinical programs since the clinical role encompasses advocacy, teaching, and consulting.

Stephanie Chalupka teaches two service learning courses: Community Health and Health Policy, and Community Projects. Chalupka has provided the following description:

• Community Health and Health Policy, a course based on the Ottowa Charter, examines eight prerequisites for health:
• Peace
• Shelter
• Education
• Food
• Income
• A stable eco-system
• Sustainable resources
• Social justice and equity.
  
• The focus of the nursing program in the first year nursing education concentrates on helping individuals to change their behaviors and adopting more healthful lifestyles.
  
• The traditional focus of many healthcare professionals, known as "downstream focus," has been to deliver healthcare services to ill people and to encourage needed behavioral change at the individual level. The focus of community/public health nursing in Community Health and Health Policy requires a shift to an "upstream focus," which includes working with aggregates and communities in organizing and setting health policy. This focus will help aggregates and communities to create options for healthier environments with essential components of health, including adequate education, housing, employment, and nutrition and provide choices that allow people to make behavioral changes, live and work in safe environments, and access equitable and comprehensive health care.

Students spend one semester using a tool developed by Chalupka to assess community health through a service learning approach that develops a partnership with a community. In the Community Projects course, all senior undergraduate nursing students, both RN and pre-licensure, conduct community projects. These start with students and a community partner together identifying the issues to be addressed. Students then assess the issue, examining relevant environmental and policy factors, as well as relevant indicator data.

Projects include community nursing diagnosis, assessment and referral, risk communication, and, often, advocacy. The students learn about aspects of interaction with communities not easily conveyed through textbook instruction, such as the fear and outrage generated by publicity around a landfill.  They design creative, engaging approaches to conveying information, for example, creating dramatic mock accidents as a component of educating adolescents about the hazards of drunk driving. Each student contracts to provide 20 hours of activities outside the classroom during the second semester.

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