Professor Boughn’s Senior Nursing Students are Making a Difference in Their Community
Susan Boughn’s senior nursing students have been gaining invaluable clinical experience by working with HomeFront, an organization dedicated to ending homelessness in central New Jersey.
How can a nursing education turn girls and boys into dignified, disciplined professional women and men? Susan Boughn, professor of nursing, believes that the senior Community/Public Health clinical course plays a role in creating professionals who are dedicated to decreasing human suffering.
Over the course of the last semester, Boughn’s senior nursing students have been working with HomeFront, an organization dedicated to ending homelessness in central New Jersey. According to Boughn, her students are “expected to be highly autonomous, and must be able to think beyond the acute care setting.”
HomeFront tackles the problem of homelessness with different approaches. While providing families with emergency food and housing, HomeFront also mentors and helps improve their lives. Parenting and workplace skills, tutoring, and enriching activities present the families with the tools they need to be self-sufficient and successful.
The involvement of TCNJ’s nursing students with HomeFront has both benefited both parties, Boughn feels. She said that the community agency “provides nursing students with learning opportunities that can not be secured anywhere else.” All of Boughn’s students agree that they have grown in their profession due to this experience.
One of the clinical experiences offered in the senior Community/Public Health course involves working with women and their children in residential programs such as HomeFront. In this program, most of the families are single women raising their children, and the ages and circumstances differ. The ages of the women range from 14–49, and the children range from infants to preteens. Not only are the students assessing the health status of individuals, but also families and the community at large.
Some of the services that the students provide include basic health and infant assessments, such as vitals and neurological assessments, as well as developmental screenings for newborns, infants, and children. Young women who are pregnant are taught about their impending labor and delivery. New mothers are given newborn bath demonstrations and discussions on the postpartum period and breastfeeding. Students also explain the basics of reproductive anatomy and physiology, sexually transmitted diseases, conception, and contraception.
The nursing students understand that simply giving lectures will not be effective, rather they use demonstration, visuals, samples, and examples while interweaving concepts related to self-esteem involving both the women and their children. Boughn explained: “Specifically, we try to help the women to understand their own rights and value, and we urge them to try to speak softly and positively to their infants and children, to always try to have a gentle touch.”
In this way, the mothers are able to actively be involved with the learning processes. Boughn stated that, initially, students were anxious about how the homeless clients would receive them; however they “came away from the experiences knowing that they also received valuable life lessons from the women.”
Students from last semester were able to step outside of their comfort zones and were forced to “think on their feet.” Another student noticed a personal transformation while taking the course. She felt “more knowledgeable, professional, responsible, competent…and self-sufficient.” Lastly, another student remarked that she felt “very comfortable going out into the community and being an advocate for vulnerable populations.”
This past semester, Boughn’s students were undergoing the same personal and profession transformation the seniors before them had experienced. Looking back on more than 25 years of taking her students through the senior clinical in Community/Public Health, Boughn remarked, “It is still thrilling to me after all these years. I watch young women and men nursing students go through a transformation process right before my eyes.”
Posted on May 14, 2009
