Bringing Global Health Home through Community Health Mentorship

Purpose: The U.S. is increasingly ethnically and culturally diverse.  Immigrants settle into communities where the people have similar beliefs, culture, and health practices.  These enclaves present many challenges to health care delivery and the nurses striving to provide culturally sensitive care to highly diverse populations.  This presentation describes the KILN community health mentorship program and presents exemplars of the joint partnership activities that facilitate students’ understanding of local and global interconnectivity, opening their eyes to the social determinants of health.

Methods: KILN students collaborate with experienced mentors throughout their nursing education, including the community health and leadership capstone courses, for values clarification and skill development. 

Results: Students better operationalize newfound knowledge in formal and informal pedagogical activities with community members, allowing them to address the immediate and long term healthcare needs across the nexus of individuals, families and communities in culturally sensitive ways.   Of key importance is that students have learned to promote client self-efficacy and advocacy, thus assisting them to successfully transcend multiple access barriers to healthcare. The cognitive and affective knowledge that students have gained from global experiences inform their nursing practice locally.  They synthesize their knowledge from global experiences, incorporate it into their nursing practice with the assistance of community heath mentors and share key information with peers.  This has advanced evidence-based practice to “real world” situations for the students, as well as for their clinical partners and others in the larger academic community.  

Conclusion: Collectively, these activities promote the removal of barriers and include individualized instruction to promote health literacy, the enrollment of individuals and families in public insurance programs, and the provision of care management services from problem identification through diagnosis and implementation of plan of care. Students develop skills that they can use in local communities and also apply to global health activities.