News
April 2009
International Nursing: Immersing Students in Cultural Complexity
Three weeks in Uganda showed UW–Madison senior nursing student Lynsea Brovold that good care does not require the most modern equipment.
Three weeks in one of Mexico’s poorest states gave UW senior nursing student Andrea Gilmore a different sense of community, showing her how culture influences people’s approach to health care and leaving her grateful for the experience. "I’m young now; I should widen my perspective and see other cultures,” she says. "When we create these positive relationships, we can create a domino effect.”
UW–Madison nursing student Nora Keegan (right, foreground) and hospital staff tend to a patient in the pediatric unit at Adolfo Prieto Hospital in Taxco, Mexico.
In establishing the Global Health Travel Fund for Nursing Students, Linda Baumann, PhD, RN, professor of nursing at the UW–Madison School of Nursing, and colleague Karen Solheim, PhD, RN, clinical professor of nursing, hope to make international study more accessible for students, who can complete their required community health nursing course in Mexico, Uganda, or Thailand.
When students experience other cultures, they see wealth and poverty, happiness and sadness, Baumann says. "If anything, it will make people feel more connected.”
The international trips take students to developing countries with high rates of poverty and need. They look at environmental, governmental, and cultural influences on health and see the complexity of the world firsthand. "Most of these students will practice in the United States,” Baumann says. "The lessons they learn through these immersion experiences will make them more comfortable in impoverished environments or cross-cultural situations. The issues students confront internationally are the same issues that exist in Wisconsin.”
The Community Health Nursing course, which focuses on diverse population health, shows students how nurses intervene to promote health and prevent disease. Most students will spend their time at one of about forty Wisconsin sites working in a variety of settings, from county public health departments and schools to community mental health programs, parishes, and Head Start, Solheim says.
Whether local or global, the community health experience focuses on population health and puts students in touch with vulnerable populations, many ethnic groups, and underserved local citizens, Solheim says.
This spring, Baumann leads the 2009 Uganda trip, Solheim leads the Thailand course, and Roxanne Gorbach, MS, NP, directs her third trip to Taxco, Mexico.
UW–Madison nursing students Nora Keegan (left) and Megan Brennan prepare a patient for surgery at Adolfo Prieto Hospital in Taxco, Mexico.
Students spend a semester in class to prepare them for three weeks on site. The health problems that they will encounter, from women dying in childbirth and infant mortality to rampant AIDS and malnutrition, are magnified by poverty. They also are immersed in worlds that live by different expectations, ways of communicating, and providing health care.
"They get a sense of negotiating in a different culture when they’re in the minority,” says Baumann, who made her first overseas nursing trip as a School of Nursing faculty member in 1989 to train nurse teachers in Vietnam. "That’s difficult to do in Wisconsin.”
Gilmore and Brovold encountered extreme poverty in their international experiences, learned how nurses struggle to overcome it, and found that people can be happy no matter what their circumstances.
"I think happiness is found in not taking things for granted,” said Brovold, when asked what she learned in Uganda. While she might get frustrated with her Madison patient load, her international experience gave her perspective. Her patients are not waiting in line for medicine that might run out; she is not making tourniquets out of rubber gloves; she can count on hot, running water.
Gilmore returned from Taxco wondering if American health care is wasteful. The nurses did not have immediately accessible X-ray equipment or abundant supplies of sterile gloves and individual alcohol swabs, yet provided quality care. "It was eye-opening,” she says.
Living with cultural differences also convinced her that much more patient education is needed to help patients who don’t speak English navigate the health care system. "The nursing profession has a duty to prepare and educate nurses at all levels to ensure that we are equipped to provide care to diverse populations,” she says.
To obtain more information about the Global Health Travel Fund for Nursing Students or to make a gift, contact Coleen Southwell, director of development, at Coleen.Southwell@uwfoundation.wisc.edu or
(608) 263-6007.