Community Health Resource Center

Background

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 effectively respond to the health system changes and the objectives of Healthy People 2010, it is imperative to revamp the current model of educating health professionals.  New programs and teaching strategies need to be implemented to ensure that future health care providers have the knowledge, skills, and values to practice in this evolving system (Bellack, Graber, O'Neil, Musham, & Lancaster, 1999). Recent data (Berlin & Bednash, 2000) indicate that students in nurse practitioner education programs currently comprise the largest percentage of students in master's level advanced practice nursing programs.   Thus, NP students represent a large pool of future health care leaders who will need a community-oriented and culturally-sensitive background to meet the challenges of an evolving health care delivery system.

The nurse practitioner role has strong roots in community health.  The first nurse practitioners were originally public health nurses whose role expanded to meet the health care needs of clients in underserved rural and urban areas.  Even though NP education has always placed great importance on prevention and health promotion (American Academy of Nurse Practitioners, 1993) and the provision of competent care to vulnerable populations, current realities in the health care delivery system are also challenging the traditional role of nurse practitioners and, therefore, the way they are educated. Nurse practitioners are increasingly asked to provide community education, to serve on health planning boards, and to offer expert advice on health policy.   Furthermore, more students have come from acute care backgrounds with little experience in community health. These students need increased content on community-focused care.

This new generation of nurse practitioner students will look to current faculty as role models for this increased community orientation.  Therefore, faculty in nurse practitioner programs must have the knowledge and skills themselves to prepare students in the important components of community health nursing.  To this end, NONPF developed, implemented, and evaluated a faculty-to-faculty mentoring program to promote faculty development in community health.  Connie Uphold, ARNP, PhD, was chosen as the project director and NONPF assembled an Advisory Board to oversee the project.  The program was funded by the Helene Fuld Health Trust.  The objective of the mentoring program was to provide a model to guide faculty in preparing nurse practitioners to practice from broad, population-based perspectives and to partner with communities to improve the public's health.

The Faculty-to-Faculty Mentoring Program in Community Health began its work in Fall 1999.  Twelve faculty participants attended two mentoring workshops at each of thee sites: Georgia Southern University, Northeastern University, and the University of Texas at El Paso.  The faculty participants learned innovative teaching methods for presenting community health concepts and gained first-hand knowledge of caring for the community as an aggregate when they toured communities and clinical agencies surrounding the mentor universities. Faculty participants also completed community projects in collaboration with mentor faculty.  The outcomes of these individual projects and the mentoring program were presented in a monograph, Challenges and Opportunities for Integrating Community Health in Nurse Practitioner Programs.   In Fall 2000, a second cohort of the mentoring program started work with three new mentor sites: the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Texas Medical Branch.  Selected project reports from the second cohort are available here.

In 2001, NONPF took steps to take this initiative to the next level with large scale implementation across NP programs.  With continued support from the Helene Fuld Health Trust, NONPF developed a three part project in faculty development in community health.  This project was designed to broadly disseminate the concepts presented to the participants in the mentoring program, to implement a redesigned version of the mentoring program, and to develop an online resource center for information on community health.

In November and December 2001, NONPF presented the three part Teleweb Series in Community Health.  These conferences featured panels of distinguished experts in NP education and community and public health.  The Teleweb Series was offered at no charge to all NP programs.  The Teleweb format brought together speakers and faculty members from across the country.  Archived versions of all three parts of the Teleweb Series can be accessed through this page.

After the Teleweb Series, NONPF solicited abstracts for community health projects.   The selected authors were matched up with mentors in the Faculty-to-Faculty Mentoring Program in Community Health.  This third cohort met with the mentors at the 28th Annual Meeting in Minneapolis to begin developing and implementing their projects.  The participants in the third cohort presented posters on their projects at the 29th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.   Their project reports were included in the final report of the mentoring program, Community Health and Nurse Practitioner Education.

The third part of our project is this Community Health Resource Center.  The goal of this website is to provide both key background information and current innovations and developments in community health.  We welcome your feedback on ways we can improve this website.

NONPF would like to thank the Helene Fuld Health Trust for its support of our initiatives.  We would like to thank Dr. Connie Uphold and our Advisory Board for their guidance in all phases of the project.  We would like to thank our Teleweb speakers, mentors, and faculty participants for all their hard work in helping to meet the goals of this project.

References

American Academy of Nurse Practitioners. (1993). Scope of practice. Austin, TX: Author.

Berlin, L.E., and Bednash, G.D. (2000). 1999-2000 Enrollment and Graduations in Baccalaureate and Graduate Programs in Nursing. Washington, DC: American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

Bellack, J.P., Graber, D.R., O’Neil, E.H., Musham, C. & Lancaster, C. (1999). Curriculum trends in nurse practitioner programs: Current and ideal. Journal of Professional Nursing, 15 (1), 15-27.

Pew Health Professions Commission (1995). Critical challenges: Revitalizing the health professions for the twenty-first century. San Francisco, CA: UCSF Center for the Health Professions.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (1998). Healthy People 2010: National health promotion and disease prevention objectives. U.S. DHHS. Washington, DC: Public Health Services.

Zotti, M. E., Brown, P., & Stotts, R. C. (1996). Community-based nursing versus community health nursing: What does it all mean? Nursing Outlook, 44 (5), 211-217.