Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #116041

Jeanne Beauchamp Hewitt, PhD, RN, School of Nursing, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, PO Box 413, Miwaukee, WI 53122, 414-229-5463, jbhewitt@uwm.edu

The UW-Milwaukee Marine and Freshwater Biomedical Sciences Center has three efforts underway to support the advancement of Nursing and Environmental Health. Since 2000, we have supported masters students who elect to specialize in environmental health in their practicum experience and master's project through the Great Lakes Scholars (GLS) in Environmental Health Program (funded by ATSDR). Under the same program, Dr. J. Hewitt presents lectures on environmental health to graduate and undergraduate nursing students each semester. Approximately 175 undergraduate students and 25-30 graduate students are reached through the GLS lectures each year. In 2004, Dr. Hewitt developed and offered a new course to 22 senior-level students on occupational and environmental health nursing. The GLS lectures and this course are designed to meet the Institute of Medicine's (1995) core and advanced competencies. Dr. Hewitt also serves as a resource to faculty, academic teaching staff, clinical staff, students, and alumni for electronic and other resources, as well as provides telephone consultations and referrals regarding environmental health. The next step is a faculty development initiative, which is being implemented in collaboration with Harvard's Environmental Health Center, to offer two national conferences on Nursing and Environmental Health. The focus of this initiative is to develop key nursing faculty (N = 30) and public health nurses leaders (N = 20) at each of the two conferences who can be champions of incorporating environmental health in their respective educational and public health nursing settings. Evaluation of these initiatives and the challenges encountered will be addressed.

Learning Objectives:

• (1)Describe and compare 3 strategies for teaching basic and advanced concepts of environmental health nursing to different target audiences.
• (2)Describe at least 2 challenges to incorporating environmental health into existing courses.
• (3)Describe 3 evaluation strategies for educational and practice settings.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.