Interprofessional Education in Public Health Nursing: A Neighborhood Clinical Experience Model

I-CAN (Interprofessional Care Access Network) is a grant-funded collaborative program for clinical practice and education that enhances the health care experience, improves population health outcomes, and reduces health care costs for disadvantaged and underserved patients, families and populations within a neighborhood.  Within I-CAN, interprofessional students provide support for individual residents of the neighborhood and focus on resident-identified population health needs that support health and well being for all residents in the neighborhood.  Under supervision of clinical faculty, students collaborate in care teams to identify and address service gaps and barriers related to social determinants of health. These experiences through the I-CAN framework provide authentic clinical learning experiences about people within the context of their neighborhoods and create a framework for preparing future public health nurses.  Local public health departments are not resourced to support previously used preceptor models for preparing the public health nursing (PHN) workforce. The I-CAN framework gives students an opportunity to actualize the role of the public health nursing within a neighborhood without constraints from existing public health role descriptions. The I-CAN model provides a team-based practice that evolves in parallel with the changing healthcare environment and prepares students with vision and skill for managing an evolving practice environment that incorporates the context of  people’s lives and neighborhoods into their healthcare plans.