Elms School of Nursing Receives $750,000 Grant from Kellogg Foundation
CHICOPEE — The School of Nursing at Elms College has received a $750,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to improve health outcomes in Haiti through nursing faculty development beginning in summer 2019.
In Haiti — where infant mortality rates are the highest in the Americas, and life expectancy is the lowest — most healthcare is provided by nurses, so educating nurses for the future workforce is critical to the health of the Haitian population. Skill development for student nurses depends on competent and well-trained faculty, but nursing faculty in Haiti are reportedly unprepared for clinical teaching and need enhanced teaching.
The Elms program will prepare two cohorts of approximately 40 faculty from approved nursing schools across Haiti and clinical educators from multiple hospitals to be skilled nurse educators. The two cohorts will complete a graduate certificate transferable to a master’s program, providing a pathway for lifelong learning and increasing enrollment in MSN programs.
This sustainable and replicable continuing-education program will use a train-the-trainer model to enhance the nurse educators’ abilities to deliver the content going forward. Content threaded throughout courses will include graduate-level study of the role and skills of the nurse educator, health and physical assessments, nursing leadership, maternal and child health, and other health disparities.
“Because to many we in the U.S. represent the gold standard of nursing, I believe we have an obligation to share our expertise and contribute to global nursing and healthcare,” said Kathleen Scoble, dean of the School of Nursing at Elms. “We are honored to have the opportunity to make a difference through nurse faculty development, which we hope will become a program for replication. After all, in my international nursing experiences, nursing and the human condition are universal despite language and geographical differences. The Elms nursing faculty will gain as much or more than the Haitian nurse faculty they are teaching and mentoring as they learn this new culture and environment of practice.”