Paper
Thursday, July 12, 2007
MHIRT (Minority Health International Research Training) students at the Institute of Nursing Science at Witten/Herdecke University/Germany
Elke Donath, PhD1, Andreas Buescher, PhC, RN2, Bernhard Holle, MScN, RN1, and Sascha Schmidt, MScN, RN1. (1) Institute of Nursing Science, University of Witten/Herdecke, Witten, Germany, (2) Institute for Nursing Science, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany
The Institute of Nursing Science provides educational programmes for nurses at Bachelor, Master and PhD level. It carries out research on, among others, family oriented and community based care and on the impact of the economic, social and legal framework and cooperation and communication problems as stress components for nurses and medical doctors (e.g. the introduction of the DRG system into German hospitals). Two MHIRT (Minority Health International Research Training) students were on placement from Florida International University at the Institute of Nursing Science in Fall 2006. The learning objectives were to get an insight view into ongoing research projects within the German health care system. This involved an introduction into the main features of this system. One student joined the research team in a study on obligatory counselling visits by nurses for people receiving cash benefits from the long-term care insurance. The other student worked in a research team investigating working conditions and interdisciplinary collaboration in different hospitals. In preparation of their stay they prepared presentation on the subjects of these research projects. One presentation concerned long-term care regulations in the USA and the other presentation focused on nurse-physician relationships. These presentations served as a means of learning about different approaches in different health care systems. Students performed literature searches with regard to the projects and they were introduced to general skills needed in research, such as using SPSS, developing research questions, writing literature reviews. The learning experience was affected due to language barriers as all projects in all stages were performed in German. Therefore data collection and data analysis was a more theoretical rather than practical experience. Beside the learning experience in terms of research students reported a valuable learning experience in terms of becoming familiar with living and acting in a different cultural environment.