Anatomy Academy: The Impact on School Nurses

It is critical for nurses to develop expert teaching, mentoring and communication skills and to collaborate with organizations to empower individuals toward healthy lifestyles. However, few opportunities exist to engage in mentoring and teaching roles to do so.  Limited research exists on interventions to enhance student nurses’ self-perceived ability to promote healthy behaviors through teaching and mentoring in school-based interventions. The purpose of this pilot study is to examine the impact on student nurse self-perceived abilities from mentoring in a school based childhood obesity prevention program called Anatomy Academy (AA).   

Hypothesis-Mentoring in the AA program increases the nursing students’ self-perceived abilities to communicate health related concepts and to collaborate with other organizations toward common health related goals. 

Methodology-Student nurses volunteering in AA were recruited for the study (N=14). After expert faculty review of the tool, the Self-Perceived Abilities Questionnaire (SPAQ), a five item Likert type self-assessment tool, was implemented both before and after participation in AA.

Analysis-Descriptive and inferential statistics for individual items and the instrument overall at pre-test and post-test were calculated using SPSS. A paired t-test was conducted to assess changes in overall self-assessment scores from pre-test to post-test.

Findings- The overall paired t (13) = -12.4, p < .001, with Cohen’s d = 3.3. The mean (sd) pre-test score was 15.9 (3.0) and the mean (sd) post-test score was 21.1 (2.2).  Student self-assessment scores rose significantly from pre-test to post-test. Cohen’s d indicated a large effect.

Conclusion/recommendations-Students self-perceived abilities show mentoring in AA to be an effective intervention to increase student nurse self-perceived teaching, mentoring, communication and interprofessional collaboration abilities.  In the future, opportunities for student nurses to participate in interventions such as AA should be included in nursing school curriculums to help build expert teaching, mentoring, communication, and interprofessional collaboration skills.