By Susan Kreimer, MS, contributor
Dec. 4, 2009 - In the summer of 2009, a hundred graduate nursing students and faculty from around China attended community health courses at Xi’an Jiaotong University in northwestern Shaanxi province.
They welcomed educators from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) to launch China’s first master’s nursing program in community health. Part of health care reform, the initiative aims to improve access for underserved and high-risk populations in urban and rural areas.
Global alliances between American and foreign nursing schools have grown in a wide-scale effort to promote cooperation among countries, share educational materials and collaborate in research projects of regional and international importance.
In August 1986, the World Health Organization (WHO) designated the UIC College of Nursing as a WHO Collaborating Center for International Nursing Development in Primary Health. Today, there are approximately 40 WHO Nursing Collaborating Centers focusing on various aspects of medical care.
“The center serves as a resource for nurses throughout the world,” said Beverly J. McElmurry, EdD, RN, FAAN, professor and associate dean of the UIC Global Health Leadership Program. While offering abundant opportunities, the Center expects nurses to become leaders in education, practice and research. “Global health is essential for peace and development in this shrinking world,” she said.
When it comes to health, the distance and boundaries between countries and continents have become almost irrelevant. Communicable diseases spread rapidly with international travel. Some health issues, such as hypertension and obesity, occur frequently in many places. Meanwhile, the aging population is a worldwide phenomenon, regardless of a nation’s economic status, according to Elizabeth Madigan, PhD, RN, FAAN, head of the WHO Collaborating Center for Home Care Nursing at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
The center, which earned the WHO designation in 1993, recently helped develop educational materials for acute respiratory diseases in low-resource countries. “We then took these materials to St. Lucia for field testing to determine what adaptations would be needed,” Madigan said.
Madigan and her colleagues worked with local nurses, physicians, nursing students and representatives from the Ministry of Health, preparing for catastrophic events on the level of an influenza pandemic.
These global alliances also prepare U.S. nursing students to practice in multicultural environments and with colleagues of different ethnic backgrounds. “Our nursing students are likely to care for people from a number of countries, including new immigrants and refugees, as well as second- and third-generation migrants who will have assimilated to varying degrees,” said Mary E. Riner, DNS, RN, associate professor at the Indiana University School of Nursing in Indianapolis, designated a WHO Collaborating Center in Healthy Cities in 1991.
Even if nursing students don’t pursue careers or stints in global health, Evelyn L. Acheson, Ph.D., RN, would like them “to be aware of the greater world.” She also sees similarities between global and rural health. “While it seems that they might be miles apart, I’m not so sure they are, because many of the issues that affect rural areas also affect the world,” said Acheson, assistant professor and director of international programs at the University of Oklahoma College of Nursing in Tulsa. The college is an affiliate of the WHO Collaborating Center for International Nursing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Global perspectives aren’t taught in a particular course. Instead, she said, the college covers international issues throughout the nursing curriculum and brings scholars from other countries to interact with students and faculty. Students also travel with Acheson to Bolivia, Mexico and other countries, sometimes training village workers in community health. Funding for such programs is often unavailable, so participants pay their own way. “We try to make things as self-sufficient as possible,” Acheson said.
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