Poster Presentation
Thursday, July 12, 2007
9:30 AM - 10:15 AM
Thursday, July 12, 2007
3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
Collaborative Health Promotion in an Elementary School Community
Norvetta Whitson, Nursing, Bellarmine University, Louisville, KY, USA
| Learning Objective #1: Discuss strategies for health promotion in schools without nurses. |
| Learning Objective #2: Evaluate the positive and negatives of collaboration for health promotion in a school setting. |
A metropolitan public school system has chosen academics as their priority, and as a result of budget constraints, have not hired school nurses for many years. Since the school nurse is frequently the initiator of health promotion/disease prevention activities, the school health promotions coordinator sought other methods for meeting their health promotion needs. Nursing clinical faculty, the school health promotions coordinator and the family resource coordinator established preliminary programming to combat obesity in the children, as part of a community clinical for nursing students. The process evolved into a collaboration that included.: Undergraduate nursing students from a local university, Sigma Theta Tau, Lambda Psi Chapter, School staff, PTA, Registered Dietician, area businesses, and a Kentucky Action for Healthy Kids Grant. Health promotion activities were designed to address the entire school community, including staff, teachers, and parents. To date seven activities, including nutrition education and exercise sessions have been provided.
Implications to nursing practice
For students to perform academically they must be healthy. In order to activate positive health behaviors among children, the entire school community must be involved. In an environment without school nurses, school systems can identify partners and work collaboratively to provide useful health promotion activity. Without collaboration, the program would not have been successful.