Katie Hooven
The College of New Jersey, USA
Title: Creating Curriculum to Create Change: Threading the concept of Population Health into the Undergraduate Nursing Curriculum, Challenges and Opportunities
Biography
Biography: Katie Hooven
Abstract
The overall goal of the Population Health program is to improve health and wellness in patient populations. This is achieved by understanding health outcomes and the determinants that impact these outcomes. Nurses are considered the largest body of healthcare providers in the United States which gives them a great advantage to be involved with patient care decision making. Through a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the New Jersey state college was able to enhance the population health content throughout the nursing curriculum.
The initiative had three major components. These were (1) Faculty Development, (2) Content and Learning Object Development/Implementation, and (3) Laboratory (Simulation) and Clinical Experience Development and Implementation. The school of nursing moved forward on these major components simultaneously.
Faculty Development included imparting knowledge and skills upon core faculty for developing population health content and learning objects, conducting train-the-trainer style workshops with core faculty, led by a recognized leader in public health, population health, and curriculum development. Core faculty attended national meetings on population health and brought the knowledge back to the department by leading faculty development meetings with their colleagues on population health content development. The second part of implementation includes content and learning object development/implementation. The core faculty evaluated their specific courses and content to revise content to include population health competencies. The school established faculty course work groups and included the interprofessional practice partners on curriculum revision. The school of nursing developed two additional courses that are now offered as electives for the nursing students. Topics in Nursing: Nursing and Global Health and Health Informatics. The third theme focused on Laboratory (Simulation) and Clinical Experience Development and Implementation. The community clinical experience was enriched with health promotion activities. Nursing students and had to research existing data on the communities and populations of interest at partner clinical sites, develop a list of community assets and resources available to the populations of interest, design health programs to meet identified needs, determine the data to be collected from each participant, conduct population health screening and health education events based in needs assessment, create a de-identified database for the population of interest, evaluate findings and disseminate findings to their class and the agency of interest