News
May 2010
School of Nursing Students Take the 'LEAP' to Rusk County
The Wisconsin Idea holds that the work of the University of Wisconsin should reach out beyond the campus to the boundaries of the state. This May, nine community public health nursing students from the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Nursing will enact their own version of the Wisconsin Idea as they begin a three-week public health residency in Rusk and Barron counties. The student nurses will be engaged in a number vital county prevention and community health education projects.
"The program immerses our nursing students in a rural environment that has very different cultural and social challenges than those found in the university environment," explains Linda Baumann, PhD, RN, professor of nursing at UW-Madison, who will accompany the students. "It offers them a much different environment for their clinical training. It illustrates how a higher education institution can successfully partner with a community public health department. At the same time, it helps us develop our teaching programs and provides a community with public health nursing resources."
Rusk County public health officer Kayo Nash will oversee the group. She says the nursing students will have plenty of projects to keep them busy.
"One of the county's health priorities is dealing with underage alcohol use," she says. "There is a program called 'Parents Who Host, Lose the Most,' which will serve as a basis for some of our prevention ideas. We also have underage users who have already been ticketed, so there is evidenced-based prevention work to do with that group as well.
"They'll also do job shadowing. We have a sanitarian on staff they may shadow, as well as two school nurses at the high school. We also have a huge need to help people install their car seats properly. Eighty-five to ninety percent of car seats are not installed right. We have a grant funding work on helping people provide the proper restraint, which will literally save children's lives. And in Barron County they'll have the opportunity to interact with a large Somali refugee population that has re-located there. So, they're getting a global experience right here in Wisconsin."
Nash says the benefits for the students and the counties are significant. Students will help staff complete projects they haven't had the resources to complete. At the same time, students will gain new experiences that ultimately will add to the sustainability of the public health work force.
"We're a small, poor county—with unemployment at over fourteen percent, we have some of the highest unemployment in the state," she says. "What that means is that we have all the problems that go along with the culture of poverty—substance abuse problems, robberies, etcetera. Students are going to get an experience in Wisconsin that mirrors what they'd find in other desperate areas of the country."
The School of Nursing student immersion project is part of the Linking Education and Practice for Excellence in Public Health Nursing Project (LEAP Project), which is based at the UW–Madison School of Nursing. The LEAP Project (http://www.son.wisc.edu/leap) is a federally funded project that brings together public health nurses, student nurses, and nursing faculty statewide in an effort to improve education and improve public health nursing practice.