Developing a Framework for Faculty Global Scholarship

Global health is a strategic initiative for the nursing program and the institute where I serve as Dean. Faculty are actively engaged in a number of global projects including participating in mission trips, providing professional services and direct patient care, leading student immersions and studies abroad, and consulting and training nurses in nursing programs or practice sites. Faculty activities occur in diverse sites including locations in the Caribbean, Africa, South and Central America, the former Soviet Union and Asian-Pacific countries.

As a nursing dean supporting faculty members with great interest in international work and a strategic goal to enhance the global awareness of our students and faculty, it was critical that we develop a framework to guide the global activities, provide coherence to the disparate work, and measure our outcomes. Many of these activities become part of the faculty’s work life and are reported annually as teaching and service activities and/or scholarship. My institution uses the Boyer’s model of scholarship (1990) and faculty conduct global projects in discovery, teaching and application. Our promotion criteria are built on Boyer’s model and we continue to explore ways to make the model relevant for our faculty by reviewing current literature. A recent article by Moser, Ream and Braxton (2016) provides additional perspective.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has the global strategy to deliver its global mandate and implement its programs in a timely and cost effective manner with six major goals:

providing leadership on matters critical to health and engaging in partnerships where joint action is needed; shaping the research agenda and stimulating the generation, translation and dissemination of valuable knowledge; setting norms and standards and promoting and monitoring their implementation; articulating ethical and evidence-based policy options; providing technical support, catalysing change, and building sustainable institutional capacity; and monitoring the health situation and assessing health trends ( Retrieved from http://www.who.int/about/what-we-do/en/).

While our work does not equal the scope of that done by WHO, we have created our version of the six goals and they are reflected in our global work.

The strategies used to develop a framework and a process for global nursing occurred over a period of one year in an effort to unify and strengthen the School’s global health initiative with minimal resources. Our process was comprehensive in scope and included many dimensions. The global health faculty met every two months to discuss projects and to share perspectives. We developed shared values and agreed upon a common ground rules to guide our work. Faculty integrated global competencies into the curricula and competed for internal grants to support interprofessional and uniprofessional student experiences. We are addressing the need for domestic and global partnerships to increase our access to resources. We have offered a global health certificate at the graduate level for several years. Finally, faculty have published articles and textbooks on global health and disseminated project findings in oral and poster presentations.

Our framework is designed to provide coherence to our work. Ways to enhance global scholarship among faculty, develop partnerships with global organizations and develop an approach to educate our students have become the foci of this important work. The presentation with highlight the opportunities and challenges of our focus on global health in a nursing program.