Strengthening an academic nursing center through partnership.

Nurse-managed health centers offer holistic health care and patient-centered health promotion and disease prevention. These goals are particularly well suited to the needs of children and their families. Few reports in the literature, however, have described such practices. The purpose of this paper is to describe one practice, Valencia Health Services (VHS), a nurse-managed, academic health center providing primary care to pediatric and adolescent patients. Valencia Health Services offers interdisciplinary, comprehensive health services to ethnically diverse children and their families through an inter-university partnership and provides clinical experiences and research opportunities, under the supervision of expert faculty-clinicians, to students of nursing (advanced practice, public health, and case management), social work and psychology. Valencia Health Services is the rare nurse-managed academic health center that provides comprehensive health care to children and adolescents. The multifaceted demands of such a health center, however, present both unique opportunities for quality care and service and considerable ongoing challenges.