In the Community
Students in the Community
Community-Based Research Projects
Service Learning Courses
Collaborative Community Research
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.
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Haverhill Community Action.
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Worcester Health Agency.
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Faculty have been especially active helping to develop health policy with the Board of Greater Lowell Head Start.
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
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.
Community-Based Research Projects
Undergraduate nursing students perform community-based research projects, including studies of available health services. Doctoral students conduct studies on a broad variety of community health topics, some of which examine local study sites.
Nursing faculty have conducted several research projects in the local area. For example, an interdisciplinary team studied asthma incidence, prevalence and risk factors for three years at Lowell Head Start (Ladebauche P., Nicolosi R., Reece S., Saucedo K., Volicer B., Richards T. (2001). Asthma in Head Start children: prevalence, risk factors, and health care utilization. Pediatric Nursing; 2001, 27(4)396-399). Investigators interviewed parents of 316 children. They found a 35 percent prevalence of asthma in this population. Among those with asthma, 74 percent had used an emergency room at least once, 41 percent had been hospitalized, and 55 percent had experienced physical activity limitations.
Other nursing faculty research has addressed rapid response for victims of domestic violence with the Lawrence Hospice and VNA; prevalence of overweight among children in Lowell Head Start; the processing of laboratory tests and discharge at Lahey Clinic; care giving by Cambodian daughters to elderly; social and cultural issues in health care; and community-based and multidisciplinary approaches in nursing education (see for example Dowling J. S., Marchand-Ciriello, L.A., Rapid Response for Clients at Risk. National Telecommunication and Information Administration. Funding through Home Health VNA and Hospice,
Additional publications on community work have included: Reece S., Mawn B., & Scollin P. (2003). Evaluation of faculty transition into a community-based curriculum. Journal of Nursing Education, 42(1):43-47; Dowling J., & Coppens N. (Nov./Dec. 1996). Understanding culture and health practices through an experiential learning project. "Nurse Educator," 21(6):43-46; Pearce C. (2003). The challenge of multi-site research. In J. Hawkins & L. Haggerty (Eds.), "Diversity in Health Care Research: Strategies for Multisite,Multidisciplinary, and Multi-Cultural Projects."
Nursing faculty have collaborated on a variety of projects with the Center for Family, Work and Community (CFWC). The first National Institute for Environmental Health Science (NIEHS) grant to CFWC, which focused on Southeast Asian Environmental Justice, was designed to draw in nursing professors and students. Students who participated reflected on the ways that participation in this project would inform their work as future nurses. Beyond Our Bodies, a current study of the potential health impacts of personal care products, involves
"Cambodian Health 2010" is a seven-year CDC-funded project led by
Dr.Chalupka heads the HUD-funded Healthy Homes Demonstration Project together with Linda Silka, David Turcotte, and Lowell Health Department Director Frank Singleton. This project aims to improve training, cross-training, cross referrals and educational outreach among 20 community based and faith-based organizations that currently visit children in
Dr.Chalupka developed the home visitor training, which enables these workers to educate parents about hazards such as mold, dust, lead paint, insects, and smoking, and to help them resolve these problems. This training stresses a multi-cultural perspective. Project leaders are also developing methods for tracking observations on home environmental quality. The Healthy Homes Project has involved several Health Education and undergraduate Nursing students fulfilling their service learning requirement.
Dr.Chalupka has collaborated with fellow members of the UMass Lowell New England Consortium to develop an NIEHS funded curriculum for "Worker Education and Training in Preparation for Future Disasters and Terrorist Attacks with Weapons of Mass Destruction." The major goals of this project are to provide awareness level and advanced emergency response training for targeted healthcare and public health workers who are likely to participate in emergency response actions related to future disasters and terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction. Training has been conducted in Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire for nurses, public health officials, and community health centers.
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 and 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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