NP students learning from medically underserved: Academic-Community Organization Partnership

Nurse Practitioner students need clinical competence and an ability to effectively care for patients within our healthcare system but are often unaware of how the system functions, especially when clients have no health insurance.  A clinical experience at a community practice site serving low income uninsured individuals can address this issue.  The Nurse Practitioner Program (FNP and AGNP) at the college of nursing has partnered with a non-profit organization that runs a medical care clinic for uninsured, low-income patients. 

This partnership is not a traditional faculty practice. Rather, the community partner and the college of nursing have reciprocal goals:  to empower uninsured individuals with access to healthcare that consequently improves health and provides a unique, high-quality educational experience for students.  The college of nursing provides a faculty member who is a Family Nurse Practitioner who serves as the provider of record to patients in the setting and faculty of record for students in a clinical practice course.  Each student works with the faculty member for four clinical days per semester.  The community partner organization hosts the clinic, schedules patient visits, and provides support staff and space for faculty-student conferencing.  This experience also exposes students to issues related to access, cost, quality and safety and their influence on healthcare, which facilitates students' future ability to advocate for changes in healthcare policy.

This presentation will provide details of how this academic-community partnership supports NONPF’s gold standard of faculty observation of students' clinical development of advanced practice nursing competencies in a controlled clinical experience.  Logistics of faculty role and workload as well as student scheduling will be described. Measured outcomes related to students’ attitudes towards poverty, compared with student peers who did not have experience with low-income, uninsured clients will be discussed.