By Trudy Tumusime
This summer, MNLC welcomed yet another group of community health placement students.
The new cohort comprising eight passionate nursing students from Humber Polytechnic’s Bachelor of Science in Nursing program started in May through August, led by their nursing instructor, Rita Street.
These third-year, second-entry students (already university graduates) brought not only their academic knowledge but also a passion to learn more about community nursing.
Our focus was on developing community health promotion and educational material, for the community members that attend MNLC,” says Rita.
The students first conducted a thorough community needs assessment, through a survey sent to MNLC clients and meeting with MNLC staff to better understand the social determinants of health of newcomers, and their preferences.
Students created and facilitated workshops with newcomer families, covering issues identified through the survey feedback. Topics included parenting as a newcomer, healthy eating for families on a budget, child growth and development and childhood vaccination. One of the students, Jocelyn Wiginton, with her colleague developed their health promotion initiative on childhood vaccination, researching newcomers’ trust in vaccines, their struggles to find vaccination clinics or translating foreign vaccination records among other issues.
“All of the information in our presentations was evidence based.” Jocelyn noted. Participants attended the workshops either in person or online and the students also created infographics so families could leave with something tangible.
In addition to health education, students also did outreach, one to a community food bank that donated bags of food they brought back to MNLC for workshop participants, and the excess left for future clients who may need it.
It was like a one-stop shop,” Rita said proudly. “Families could attend the workshop, receive health support, and take home food and clothing – all in one visit.”
For the students, this clinical placement was more than an academic exercise – it was a personal and professional transformation. For a student who had previously only been exposed to clinical skills, Jocelyn found this experience quite eye-opening. “Before this placement, I didn’t fully understand what community nursing was,” she admitted. “Now I do know that community health nursing is something that I would really like to pursue as a career option down the road.”
Jocelyn and her colleagues were honoured to learn about the unique challenges faced by newcomers to Canada. “It is a very rewarding experience for the nursing students to get to understand the lived experiences of newcomers to Canada.” Rita reiterated, “The knowledge that they’ve learned is transferable even to bedside nursing because, if they had the opportunity to care for someone who is new to Canada, they may then take into consideration some of the health inequities these individuals may be experiencing.”
Despite some challenges such as lower-than-expected attendance at their health promotion presentations, the nursing students completed and recorded all workshop presentations. Their project materials have been shared with MNLC and will continue to be distributed to clients, through our Health for All Partnership (HAP) Clinic, and other offline and online avenues.
It’s a rewarding placement and MNLC does so much for this community,” Jocelyn said. “We’re so grateful.”
The MNLC- Humber Polytechnic partnership is one to be proud of. From the HAP Clinic to the community health placement students, the Centre is impacting newcomers’ lives, making their integration a whole lot easier.
