Nursing Practicums in Health Promoting Schools: A Quality-Improvement Project

Abstract

Educating new nurses on primary prevention and population health promotion can be challenging with the erosion of public health in Canada over the past decade. The lack of public health nursing positions can create difficulties when endeavouring to engage nursing students in understanding nursing’s role in population health promotion. To understand the challenges and improve efforts to educate new nurses with regard to community health, we conducted a quality-improvement project with nursing students in health-promoting schools from a service-learning perspective. We conducted qualitative interviews with 24 fourth-year nursing students and three health-promoting school principals and used thematic analysis within a service-learning framework. Several themes emerged from the interviews, including experiencing something new, creating meaning through reflection, achieving reciprocity, and providing direct benefits to stakeholders. Health-promoting schools both benefit and provide essential opportunities for nursing students. Undeniably, nursing students provide a much-needed resource to these schools, establishing valuable personal connections with pupils in a system that is underfunded—while witnessing its needs increase. Schools provide a venue to exercise the skills of nursing such as caring and understanding the importance of community health. Applying a service-learning approach can help nursing students to appreciate the opportunity and to maximize their learning in this context. The active role of community and public health nurses in school settings can provide a necessary connection to primordial and primary prevention, and in this context, nursing students can contribute to communities while gaining valuable insight into what it means to be a registered nurse.