Hundreds of Florida International University’s College of Nursing and Health Sciences (CNHS) nursing students have taken to the streets of Miami, side by side with medical students, to provide healthcare to underserved households through the Green Family Foundation’s NeighborhoodHELP™ program.The first-of-its-kind program takes an innovative approach, educating future healthcare professionals both on campus and in the community, guided by an interprofessional curriculum. In the process they are improving health and quality of life in medically-underserved communities, and breaking down long-held “fences” that have traditionally separated nursing and physician education and practice. The NeighborhoodHELP teams include students from social work, public health law and other disciplines in addition to the CNHS nursing students and medical students from the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine.
A centerpiece of the initiative is household visits. The teams visit and engage patients in their home settings to assess, respond to, and monitor the health of the families. They also develop comprehensive health and social histories to create care plans to improve health and quality of life.
Since the program’s launch several years ago, more than 300 nursing students have joined the cause. They’ve assisted household members with a broad array of health issues, including diabetes, hypertension, breast cancer, dementia, coronary heart disease, and mental health illness.
For the families, who are members of vulnerable populations and often cannot afford care or are distrustful of authorities, it’s an opportunity to access needed healthcare. For the nursing students, it’s an opportunity to gain longitudinal experience by tracking the health and well-being of households throughout the course of their education, caring for the same families for two years and seeing the long-term consequences of their care.
It has also been an occasion for the nursing students to share their experiences in the delivery of primary care and take a leadership role with the team. The nursing students participating in NeighborhoodHELP are at a point in their education where they have more off-campus clinical experience than students from other disciplines represented on the teams. As such, nursing students are comfortable starting the initial assessment and planning with families, and leading by example for fellow teammates in the process.
As the focus for healthcare in this country is moving more towards primary, community based care and prevention, NeighborhoodHELP is a new model for healthcare education. The program provides real-world experience for nursing students preparing to enter an industry which, more and more, is based on interprofessional collaboration and care in teams serving in the community rather than an inpatient setting. In addition, as the call for nurses to exercise more independence and autonomy in providing care gains support, nursing students participating in NeighborhoodHELP will benefit from this interprofessional experience, as they gain clinical skills and develop confidence in providing care.
As the new school year progresses, a new batch of nursing students will join the ranks at NeighborhoodHELP. With their help, a new group of families across South Florida will open their doors to a healthier future.
“There is no other program like this in America,” said Dr. Andrea Chonin, a member of the CNHS nursing faculty and a faculty supervisor of student teams for NeighborhoodHELP. “We’re all in this cause together. Our students are thrilled to see the benefits of what they’re working hard to accomplish, and our families are delighted both to be receiving the help, and realize that they’re helping the student too. We’re all learning from each other.”
