C919

Course Title: The Role of the BSN Nurse in Promoting Community Health

Part A

BSN Nurses play an undeniably crucial role in efforts to promote and sustain community health. To a large extent, community health happens to be focused on groups, families, as well as individuals within a specific geographical area. To be able to ensure that the healthcare needs of the said groups, families, as well as individuals are best served, BSN nurses ought to be equipped with certain skills and competencies. This course comes in handy in this regard. A total of 8 module topics were developed. These are inclusive of: definition and nature of community health nursing (topic 1); objectives of community health nursing (topic 2); stakeholders in community health (topic 3); the role BSN nurses play in the promotion of community health (topic 4); community-based nursing interventions (topic 5); addressing challenges encountered in community nursing (topic 6); the relevance of cultural competence in community health nursing (topic 7); and review of key topics (topic 8). Effort has been made to align the course with the Essentials of Baccalaureate Education for Professional Practice. In basic terms, the essentials, as the American Association of Colleges of Nursing AACN (2008) indicates, seek to transform baccalaureate nursing education by providing the curricular elements and framework for building the baccalaureate nursing curriculum for the 21st century (3). This is more so the case in relation to essential VI (interprofessional communication and collaboration for improving patient health outcomes) and essential VII (clinical prevention and population health). In as far as essential VI is concerned, students will in this case be familiarized with cross-cultural skills (i.e. topic 7) with an intention of ensuring that they can be able to engage other professionals from diverse cultural backgrounds in meaningful formats. When it comes to essential VII, students will be equipped with the capabilities and competencies to enable them to effectively assess community attitudes as well as values and beliefs about health so as to devise the most relevant interventions (topic 5). Towards this end, those who successfully complete the course will be able to not only embrace their role in the promotion of community health, but also effectively function as part of a larger group of stakeholders in this realm. It is also important to note that students will be able to deploy viable community-based nursing interventions as well as anticipate and competently address the various challenges they could encounter in the course of fulfilling their mandate in community health nursing.

Part B

Module 1: Definition and nature of community health nursing

Module 2: Objectives of community health nursing

Module 3: Stakeholders in community health

Part C

Module 1: Definition and nature of community health nursing

Upon completion of this module, students will be able to;

1. Discuss what community health nursing comprises of

2. Describe the history and evolution of community health nursing

3. Explain the place of community health nursing in the contemporary society

Module 2: Objectives of community health nursing

Upon completion of this module, students will be able to;

1. Describe the role of community health nursing in the prevention of diseases

2. Describe the role community health nursing plays in the control of diseases

3. Identify the relevance of community health nursing in the provision of specialized services

Module 3: Stakeholders in community health

Upon completion of this module, students will...

…be requested to seek out other opportunities where health practitioners and patients interact and record their observations. Experiences can then be shared with colleagues. In essence, in the course of their observation, learners would be encouraged to reflect on;

The services provided in settings observed

Whether community health nursing is episodic or continuing

Module 2: Objectives of community health nursing

Case Studies

These could come in handy in efforts to ensure that learners are able to analyze situations and deploy appropriate theoretical knowledge to the said situations. More specifically, with case studies, real-life clinical work scenarios in community health settings can be outlined, and learners called upon to apply the concepts learned in each module topic in the assessment of the said scenarios. Case studies could in this case be designed with an intention of prompting students to analyze the role of community health nurses in;

The institution of health and wellbeing initiatives

Provision of direct care

Educating community members about chronic condition management

Module 3: Stakeholders in community health

Role Play

This would be an ideal scenario-based learning activity in efforts to guarantee an immersive learning experience. To a large extent, learners in this case will be able to actively participate in the learning process as they will be in realistic scenarios that mimic stakeholder engagements in real life settings. Diverse stakeholder engagements will be dramatized in this case with an intention of ensuring that learners are familiarized with specific stakeholder roles. For instance, in one role-play episode, different learners could assume specific roles, i.e. patient, social workers, and healthcare practitioners. The purpose in this case would be to;

Identify key stakeholders in community health

Articulate the various…