Lunch Box
Louise Miller
Public health and school nurses in rural Missouri are called upon to provide a wide range of services and information in areas that are often medically undeserved. And while the care they provide is crucial to the populations they work with, they may be hampered by a lack of experience and familiarity with the rapidly growing array of resources available online. Now, thanks to a new program designed by researchers at the School, public health and school nurses are learning how to navigate and evaluate the Internet in order to better serve their patients.
“This need was identified by Glenda Kelly of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services during a previous grant,” Louise Miller, assistant professor of clinical nursing, says. “We saw how nurses were handling their assignments and realized they were’t using the Internet efficiently.”
In 1995, Associate Professor Alice Kuehn embarked on a six-year study, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, of the causes behind the nation’s nursing shortage. Talking with nurses, health-care administrators and educators from disparate geographical and cultural settings, Kuehn identified the attributes needed for nurses to perform their role as key members of the care team.
“If nurses do not understand and apply their role appropriately, if administrators don’t hire appropriately, and if the public doesn’t recognize what nurses can do, then everyone is short-changed,” Kuehn says. “We found that public health had a real identity problem.”
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Kuehn noted a shift in nurses’ role, defined by a more pointed focus on population-based issues and care.
“Nurses were asked to be more creative and epidemiological in their approach,” she says. “But most public health nurses simply don’t have the education and preparation needed to conduct on-line research.”
Seeking to address this need, Kuehn’s team spearheaded a collaborative program among MU and State departments. Those involved include the School, MU Health Sciences Library, Missouri Liasion for the National Network for Libraries of Medicine, MU School of Information Science and Learning Technology, and the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.
During the course of her previous research, Kuehn successfully developed and implemented computer-based courses, offered at the state’s Area Health Education Centers, that allowed rural nurses to take the first steps toward bachelor’s degrees. It was a natural progression for public-health and school nurses in these areas to take another course—this one designed to improve their Internet skills. The
course, offered for the first time during the summer of 2006, helps nurses explore both public health resources online and professional on-line databases and journals.
“This program exemplifies what community health is all about,” Miller says. “We are taking the program to nurses in their own regional areas, which improves attendance but, better yet, it reinforces their local networking structures.”
Funded by the National Library of Medicine, the project involves the MU health librarians as instructors for the curriculum designed by public-health nursing faculty. Nurses who complete the course will serve as mentors for others. The educational component of the project involves a six-month and one-year follow-up to determine how much the students subsequently use the resources presented in the course.
As Kuehn transitions to retirement after a long and very productive career, Miller, who specializes in public-health nursing, will take over as the project’s principal investigator. “The nurses will learn to use both consumer and professional sites by completing exercises that help them to practice good search skills,” Miller says. About 60 nurses signed up for the first set of courses, which will be offered each summer for at least three years through the current grant.
“The nurses who participate in this program will widen the scope of their practice,” Miller says. “By obtaining better Internet-search skills, nurses will be able to access more information to help their patients and, in the process, also grow professionally.”
As the MU team works to achieve these goals, Kuehn’s vision continues with the need for a better understanding of the role public health nurses can play in the community. And through the programs she helped initiate, this vision is bound to endure, benefiting both nurses and the people they serve.