Faculty-to-Faculty Mentoring Program in
Community Health
In recent years, the health care delivery system has undergone major restructuring and changed from an individual-oriented, hospital-based health care system to a community-oriented, culturally appropriate comprehensive health care delivery system (Zotti, Brown, & Stotts, 1996). Recognizing these changes, the Pew Health Professions Commission challenged schools of health professionals to prepare future practitioners to care for the community’s health by fostering a broad, population-focused perspective (PHP Commission, 1995). To meet this challenge, it is imperative that nursing shifts paradigms to include a community-based focus and revises the way students are educated.
To be sustained, curricular revision must be accompanied by faculty development (Marcus, 1997). An innovative strategy for affecting curricular change and enhancing faculty expertise is a faculty-faculty mentoring program. Mentoring is a process of socialization into a new paradigm and serves as a means for proliferating a body of professional knowledge (Stewart & Krueger, 1996). Although mentoring typically involves role modeling and sharing between an experienced professional and an aspiring protége (Davidhizar, 1988), this two-way relationship could exist between two faculty peers – the mentor who has experience in community-based content and the faculty member who desires to increase his/her knowledge.
NONPF used this model to develop the Faculty-to-Faculty Mentoring Program in Community Health. The intended outcome of the mentoring program is to increase the community-based content throughout the curriculum of the faculty enrollees’ NP programs. The long-term goal of this project, however, is to increase awareness among educators of the significance of re-emphasizing or rebuilding the community health focus in all nurse practitioner programs. There have been three cohorts of the mentoring program. Click on the links below to read more about each respective cohort.
References
Davidhizar, RE. (1998). Mentoring in doctoral education. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 13(6), 775-781.
Marcus, MT (1997). Faculty development and curricular change: A process and outcomes model for substance abuse education. Journal of Professional Nursing, 13(3), 168-177.
Pew Health Professions Commission (1995). Critical challenges: Revitalizing the health professions for the twenty-first century. The Third Report of the Pew Health Professions Commission.
Stewart, BM & Krueger, LE. (1996). An evolutionary concept analysis of mentoring in nursing. Journal of Professional Nursing, 12(5), 311-321.
Zotti, MF, Brown P & Stotts, RC (1996). Community-based nursing versus community health nursing. What does it all mean? Nursing Outlook, 44, 211-217.
National Organization of Nurse
Practitioner Faculties (NONPF)
1522 K Street, NW, Ste. 702
Washington, DC 20005
tel: (202) 289-8044 ● fax: (202) 289-8046
nonpf@nonpf.org
President: Ann O'Sullivan, PhD, CRNP, CPNP, FAAN