Transforming the health landscape in northern communities: Shared leadership for innovation in nursing education

Abstract

People living in northern areas throughout the world experience poorer health status than their southern neighbours. Accessibility to health care services and availability of health care professionals play a role in the building of health capacity in northern regions. The College of Nursing at the University of Saskatchewan developed a principled approach to the creation of an indigenous nursing workforce in Northern Saskatchewan. This approach builds on Williams' concept of Therapeutic Landscapes, which recognizes the connectedness among environment, social interaction, and symbolic meaning within a population, and offers a way to analyze the influence of the contextual factors of place on health, and values and attitudes on well-being. In order to succeed, the College developed mutually beneficial, capacity-building relationships with northern communities, finding local champions to assist them. They reorganized their administrative structure to give visibility to their northern relationships, and built a distributive learning approach based on the commitment to "learn where you live". Measuring the success of such approaches requires the development of new and innovative evaluation strategies, beyond the usual markers of individual student success. It requires approaches that capture the impact of such education programming on the fabric of the community as a whole.

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“…In recent years, various educational programmes have been developed for students living in rural and remote circumpolar areas (Hyry-Honka et al, 2016;Edgecombe & Robertson, 2016;Møller, 2016). Such areas have had a serious shortage of nurses and most nurses are recruited from other parts of the country to work for shorter or longer periods (Berry and Butler, 2014). In addition to the difficulty of recruiting nurses to these areas, there has been little higher education locally.…”

Mental health nursing practice in rural and remote Canada: Insights from a national survey

“…In rural and remote areas, nurses assume critical roles in the delivery of healthcare services and practice across many settings, from dedicated acute care facilities to geographically isolated community clinics and outposts (Berry 2018; Jansson & Graneheim 2018). Rural and remote nurses provide care to varied patient populations, often practising in relative isolation, with limited access to specialized resources, professional supports, and training (Beks et al .…”

Under the Same Sky: Connecting Students and Cultures through Circumpolar Nursing Education

“…The provision of health services is impacted by rurality and geographical isolation across the global north [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ]. An additional challenge that applies to northern regions and worldwide is that only 38% of the nursing workforce practice in rural areas despite such regions being home to almost half of the world’s population [ 4 ].…”

“…The Northern Nursing Education Network (NNEN) was subsequently established in 2014, involving institutions from seven countries, spanning three continents, and including 13 different post-secondary northern nursing education programs [ 9 ]. The aims of the NNEN are to improve the pedagogy of northern nursing education, share best practices, and form a community of students and educators in an annual Innovative Learning Institute on Circumpolar Health (ILICH) to jointly examine and improve the clinical practice of nursing in a northern context [ 1 ]. These Institutes, as the key deliverable of the NNEN, were designed to bring together northern nursing students working in rural and remote regions of the north, create opportunities for shared learning, and expose both students and faculty to local and traditional knowledge that informs health behaviors specific to regions with populations of Indigenous peoples.…”