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Faculty-to-Faculty Mentoring
Program in Community Health
In recent years, the health care delivery system has undergone major restructuring and
changed from an individual-oriented, hospital-based health care system to a
community-oriented, culturally appropriate comprehensive health care delivery system
(Zotti, Brown, & Stotts, 1996). Recognizing these changes, the Pew Health Professions
Commission challenged schools of health professionals to prepare future practitioners to
care for the community’s health by fostering a broad, population-focused perspective
(PHP Commission, 1995). To meet this challenge, it is imperative that nursing shifts
paradigms to include a community-based focus and revises the way students are educated.
To be sustained, curricular revision must be accompanied by faculty development
(Marcus, 1997). An innovative strategy for affecting curricular change and enhancing
faculty expertise is a faculty-faculty mentoring program. Mentoring is a process of
socialization into a new paradigm and serves as a means for proliferating a body of
professional knowledge (Stewart & Krueger, 1996). Although mentoring typically
involves role modeling and sharing between an experienced professional and an aspiring
protége (Davidhizar, 1988), this two-way relationship could exist between two faculty
peers – the mentor who has experience in community-based content and the faculty
member who desires to increase his/her knowledge.
NONPF used this model to develop the Faculty-to-Faculty Mentoring Program in Community
Health. The intended outcome of the mentoring program is to increase the community-based
content throughout the curriculum of the faculty enrollees’ NP programs. The
long-term goal of this project, however, is to increase awareness among educators of the
significance of re-emphasizing or rebuilding the community health focus in all nurse
practitioner programs. There have been three cohorts of the mentoring program.
Click on the links below to read more about each respective cohort.
References
Davidhizar, RE. (1998). Mentoring in doctoral education. Journal of Advanced Nursing,
13(6), 775-781.
Marcus, MT (1997). Faculty development and curricular change: A process and outcomes
model for substance abuse education. Journal of Professional Nursing, 13(3),
168-177.
Pew Health Professions Commission (1995). Critical challenges: Revitalizing the health
professions for the twenty-first century. The Third Report of the Pew Health
Professions Commission.
Stewart, BM & Krueger, LE. (1996). An evolutionary concept analysis of mentoring in
nursing. Journal of Professional Nursing, 12(5), 311-321.
Zotti, MF, Brown P & Stotts, RC (1996). Community-based nursing versus community
health nursing. What does it all mean? Nursing Outlook, 44, 211-217. |
