Service learning in public health nursing education: How COVID‐19 accelerated community‐academic partnership

Abstract

Days after COVID‐19 physical distancing precautions were implemented, a coalition of community leaders in Baltimore City founded the Baltimore Neighbors Network (BNN), a volunteer network established to provide proactive phone‐based support to older adults in Baltimore City. BNN was a community‐driven approach aimed at reducing social isolation and improving health equity both during the pandemic and long‐term. This paper describes how the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing's (JHUSON) public health nursing clinical faculty and students partnered with BNN to support a community‐driven crisis response effort while creatively meeting student learning objectives. While engaging in the work of BNN remotely, nursing students were able to meet competencies across all eight domains of the Quad Council Coalition of Public Health Nursing Organizations. Schools of Nursing throughout the country can use this partnership as a model of a service‐learning strategy for public health nursing education during a crisis.

Serving Children and Adolescents in Need during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evaluation of Service-Learning Subjects with and without Face-to-Face Interaction

“…For example, DePaul University provided multiple indirect service opportunities, such as face-mask making (for elderly and health professionals), letter writing (for health professionals), research help, video making, and small donations [ 14 ]. Johns Hopkins School of Nursing formed a partnership with Baltimore Neighbors Network to provide their nursing students with an opportunity to serve and learn by offering phone-based support to the elderly in Baltimore during the pandemic [ 28 ].…”

“…Consistent with previous findings [ 11 , 42 ], we expected that the majority of the students in both FTF and nFTF service-learning subjects would have positive perceptions about the quality of both FTF (Hypothesis 2) and nFTF (Hypothesis 2) service-learning subjects. Besides, while there are theories and findings to support the effectiveness of FTF service learning [ 9 , 21 , 22 ], there are also arguments and evidence highlighting the value of nFTF service learning [ 28 , 31 ]. As there are both pros and cons for FTF and nFTF service learning, we examined the following research questions with competing hypotheses .…”

The other “front line”: Public health nursing clinical instruction during COVID‐19

“…When we learned about this group's urgent need to increase their capacity, we developed a partnership to include the organization as a new public health clinical site. Hundreds of students supported the effort by making outreach phone calls similar to what Gresh et al., (2020) reported, and a smaller clinical group supported the coalition with detailed program evaluation and outreach projects. This collaboration gave our students first‐hand experience engaging with a community‐driven disaster relief effort.…”

"Plan for the Worst, Hope for the Best, but Realistically, Expect a Combination of Both:" Lessons and Best Practices Emerging from Community-engaged Teaching During a Health Crisis

“…Service-learning activities pivoted due to COVID-19 have been shown to be successful when centering the community partnerships' needs (Flores et al, 2020;Talmage et al, 2020). Gresh et al's (2020) service-learning class geared to nursing students exemplified this approach.…”