Students' experience of nursing presence with poor mothers.

An awareness of the health impact of poverty is core to effective nursing practice. Consequently, a clinical course for nursing students, the focus of which was the impact of poverty upon mental, physical, and spiritual health, was developed and implemented. As the students' understanding of poverty developed, they appreciated that a nurse's spirituality and nursing presence can empower poor and marginalized mothers. Nursing presence can provide a vital form of support for poor childbearing women that may reduce risk of poor birth outcomes.

Preconception Peer Educators' exploratory outreach to the Bahamas: A foundation for an international service learning initiative.

A service learning outreach was undertaken to assess the feasibility of adapting the Preconception Peer Educator (PPE) program to Bahamian youth. By focusing on preconception health, the PPE program is a logical step toward ensuring age sensitive and developmentally appropriate education to improve potential birth outcomes and decrease infant mortality rates (IMR) associated with the complex societal problems on Grand Bahama. Concerned with the prevalence of adolescent pregnancy, lack of social support, depression, and failure to complete high school, a nurse midwife invited PPEs from a School of Nursing to meet with stakeholders to introduce the PPE program to Bahamian youth. Mentored by a faculty advisor, the PPEs assumed a leadership role and determined that the primary needs of Grand Bahamian adolescents were messages of self-empowerment and proactive life planning within a cultural context. Positive responses from stakeholders and the promise of a partnership between a School of Nursing and a Caribbean community encouraged the PPEs to adapt their PPE program to the cultural climate and needs of the island of Grand Bahama. The experience informed students' practice and leadership ability by enhancing cultural awareness and sensitivity, expanding world-views, and instilling an ethic of social responsibility.

Finding spirituality and nursing presence: the student's challenge.

The concepts of spirituality and nursing presence are difficult for nursing students to comprehend, identify, and apply. Yet holistic nursing practice obligates nurse educators to teach students about these abstract concepts. The purpose of this article is to describe a nursing faculty's approach to encourage baccalaureate students to explore and develop an understanding of the concepts of spirituality and nursing presence in light of their clinical practice. A clinical placement in a faith-based community crisis center for the poor and homeless is part of a semester-long, psychiatric/mental health clinical course. At the crisis-center day shelter, students (N = 188) develop an interactive advocacy relationship with the clients and witness both spiritual care and nursing presence. Seminar-driven, topic-focused discussions foster reflective thinking application of these difficult concepts. Without exception, the students affirm that this is an experience of self-discovery and maturation in understanding spirituality and nursing presence in nursing practice.

A different kind of clinical experience: poverty up close and personal.

Nursing faculty are faced with the dilemma of how to teach the complex health and social issues about poverty to students because most nursing students have limited exposure to the impoverished. A seminar-driven clinical experience at a crisis center was implemented to address this challenge. Preclinical and postclinical exposure questions helped both students and faculty alike identify growth in students' awareness of social responsibility, client advocacy, and ethical issues.