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The clinical nurse specialist plays a valuable role in program development, implementation, and evaluation to achieve quality healthcare through interdisciplinary collaboration. Adhering to nutrition guidelines for the hospitalized adult patient improves nutrition care plan guidance and meal intake.

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Animal-assisted activities (AAAs) show promise in providing emotional and social benefits to older adults and may be used as a tool to promote therapeutic communication between students and cognitively impaired older adults. The purpose was to develop a program incorporating AAAs to enhance social engagement of cognitively impaired older adults in a community respite program and in turn enhance student comfort when caring for this vulnerable population. The Dementia Attitudes Scale, a validated tool, was used to measure students' attitudes before and after AAA intervention. Data were analyzed using repeated-measures analysis of variance. Students were significantly more comfortable and demonstrated a gain in knowledge after AAAs were included in the community clinical experience. Incorporating AAAs into student community/service-learning clinical experience improved communication between students and cognitively impaired older adults, improving students' attitudes when caring for this population.

As the North American population of older adults increases, so does the need for nursing students to gain skills in geriatric care. Locating appropriate clinical sites for undergraduate students, including community and health promotion opportunities, prompted a public university's school of nursing to partner with a faith-based respite program. The collaboration between a public educational institution and a church-based program benefited the geriatric participants, the program leadership, and the nursing students and faculty.

Cognitively impaired older adults pose challenges that include communication barriers that may contribute to social isolation of the individual and frustration by both the individual and caregivers. Healthcare professionals must to be prepared to speak to the distinctive requirements of this population. Innovative strategies are needed to improve the ability of caregivers and health professionals to establish effective communication. Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT) is a complementary therapy that shows promise in providing emotional and social benefits to older adults in both clinical and community settings. This project aims to describe the benefits of incorporating AAT within a community respite program to enhance social engagement of cognitively impaired adults. In this project a group of subjects were exposed to two situations in an unsystematic order, visits with a dog and visits without a dog. The purpose was to compare each visit and its effect in improving engagement in those attending a community respite program. Throughout the study, respite attendees were encouraged to engage with dogs or the human visitor. In this study, AAT enhanced social engagement.

Active learning experiences for undergraduate nursing students build upon their understanding of concepts that transfer to new learning skills throughout the curriculum. Faculty implemented a leadership simulation in the classroom focusing on communication skills as a nurse leader to better understand the role of the nurse in the interdisciplinary team. The classroom setting is an ideal platform to teach interdisciplinary collaboration when opportunities do not present in the clinical setting. Scaffolding simulation experiences throughout the curriculum helps bridge the knowledge and skills gap between classroom and clinical experiences.

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