Help 50 students Continue Nursing Education

Community Health Nurses play a vital role in maintaining the health of a community.  It's primary goal is to promote disease prevention and develop healthy habits in a local area.  COVID - 19 has brought about the realization that a community health nurse plays an important role to ensure that public health is practiced in the local level where community members are able to have access medical care and be informed of how to prevent illness and disease by sharing the best practices in avoiding infection and transmission. The medical care that community health nurses can contribute are through establishing vaccination clinics and educational outreach programs.

The presence of Community Health Nurses in a locality is very significant due to the well-known fact that there is a shortage of healthcare providers and nurses.  With their availability, the local community members maybe able to manage chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease by overseeing the provision of acute care and preventive services.

Community Health Nurses can administer vaccinations, coordinate immunization and wellness checks, track the widespread presence of diseases,  medicine distribution, provide educational content and counseling as well as perform research for possible interventions.

Foundation University College of Nursing students has included Community Health Nursing in their curriculum in the hope of filling in the gaps of the health system for underserved populations.  Each team of student nurses are assigned a barangay or community to function as such.  This serves a a training ground for them that when they become full-pledged nurses they will have the heart to serve their rural communities ithroughout their career paths.

It is known globally that the nursing education has been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.  Face to face classes were suspended while clinical skills laboratories were restricted to safeguard the health of the students and faculty.  Such was a serious dilemna to both the education sector and the healthcare professional sector in terms of the occurence of a shortage of healthcare professionals.

Four years has gone by since COVID 19 and the best way to do is to move forward from that experience. We come up with an educational approach that will prepare our nursing students in case where a similar emergency should occur in the future and that is to prepare, respond, cope and recover quickly in similar circumstances.

The pandemic has brought about challenges that opened our eyes to the needs of nursing education in a crisis. The university realized that there is a need for modernization of facilities and teaching platforms as a contingency to emergency cases in the future. While these is being prepared for, initially an example of preparing is to record videos of clinical procedures that could alternate in the absence of physical laboratories.

Responding to the recent pandemic was quick enough because face to face classes were immediately suspended to prevent if not reduce community spread.  To ensure that quality learning is still maintained virutal or online delivery of instruction was implemented.  But it still boils down to the need of expensive equipment and facilities to satisfy the modernization of teaching platforms and modalities. Meantime,  responding to this emergency and that of similar occurences in the future could utilized web-based learning where products are readily available online.  And/or a budget should be primarily allocated to modify protocols in clinical laboratories  to be able to supply even the simplest personal protective equipment (e.g. face masks, gloves).

Measures such as counselling and mental health sessions should be developed for the nursing students and faculty to be able to cope with the traumatic experiences in such emergency. This is important for the nursing education for frontline health workers to be able to handle this crisis once face-to-face is fully implemented.

Today, the FoundatioNurse is on its way to recovery mode. Back-up plans are in place. Curricula is in the process of revision and approval by the Commission on Higher Education. In fact, we have graduated the first batch of nursing students last June 10, 2023. This batch earned their nursing education at theheight of Covid-19. And they did well.