Changing Buses in a Community Health Clinical
The purpose of this best teaching practice was to facilitate student understanding of the challenges families without private transportation face on a daily basis.
Rationale/Background
Undergraduate nursing students often come from backgrounds with little practical exposure to the lived experience of families in poverty. In community health clinicals students case manage vulnerable populations and are perplexed why families miss appointments, don’t have nutritious food in the house, and are not taking advantage of resources in the community.
Best Practice
This teaching strategy gives small groups of students a role such as “18 year-old single mom with six month old and two year old” along with an itinerary for the day including four destinations/addresses and tasks, i.e. Social Security Office to obtain application for SSI. All students listen to a transportation presentation detailing the bus systems and then begin their assignment of riding city buses to the destinations.
Outcomes Achieved
Students begin their day knowing they will be riding buses, yet they came to class ill prepared for walking and without food. Initially groups were confident that they would complete the assignment quickly and effortlessly, because—after all, they are intelligent nursing students. After about two hours into the experience the texts and phone calls to the instructor began. “This is a lot harder than we thought!” or a phone call “We are not even halfway done and we are hot, tired, and hungry”. The student written reflections revealed themes of compassion and respect for those who have to depend on public transportation and an increase in their own humility.
Conclusions
Spending a day on the buses in a community health clinical assists students in understanding the day-to-day challenges for families students case manage. Changing student attitudes is one of the more difficult tasks nursing educators are confronted with, yet student reflections suggest that indeed attitudes are changed after a long grueling day navigating public transportation. To more completely understand how attitudes change, future research could utilize reliable and valid tool(s) that measure differences.