Inter-Institutional Partnerships Bridging the Gap Between Health and Language
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Date
2019-04
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Ohio State University. Office of Outreach and Engagement
Abstract
Three institutions (a social service agency, a school of nursing, and a mid-sized Jesuit university) partner together to offer bilingual health and wellness programming for a diverse group of low-income women. This collaboration has developed organically, and it has grown gradually to include undergraduate Spanish students, medical students, and nursing students. We will present the results of student and participant satisfaction surveys, which highlight the many ways all parties have benefitted from this partnership. Audience takeaways include how to make service learning sustainable for both academic institutions and community partners, involve students of various levels in the same opportunity, and more efficiently make use of human resources. Crucial to our success has been open and frequent communication and combining our distinct skills/expertise.
Description
Often academics assume they must go "out" and "search" for community partners, but the most fruitful collaborations come about more organically. We represent three diverse institutions: a social service agency, a school of nursing, and a mid-sized Jesuit university. We will showcase how our three institutions came to partner together somewhat by chance and how this relationship has developed over time. As part of coursework, undergraduate students majoring in a health field and minoring in Spanish engage in service learning that is often their first connection with the Latino community in St. Louis. Undergraduates in the first iteration of this experience partnered with medical students to deliver health and wellness classes at a social service agency that serves a diverse low-income population. Since more than 75 percent of the adult women in the wellness program speak Spanish and the med students who provide the content for these sessions only speak English, the undergraduate students provided the linguistic support needed to make these sessions bilingual. From there, the collaboration grew to include more Spanish and nursing students, continuing well beyond the confines of the initial program. Crucially, this started not because someone went out looking to make it happen, but rather because we were in the right place at the right time for it to develop organically and had staff motivated enough to pursue the collaboration. Our partnership has impacted the students and community members we work with in many ways, as evidenced by student and participant satisfaction surveys. The Spanish students have benefitted by getting first-hand experience using their Spanish, leaving the "bubble" of their private university, and connecting with medical students, nursing students, and diverse community members, getting a glimpse into their future careers and building their ability to work interprofessionally. The community members gained knowledge about their health and well-being in a manner that encouraged them to keep coming back for more. They were comfortable with their limited knowledge and eager to learn all of the information that was appreciatively communicated in their native language. One of the biggest challenges faced by academics and community workers alike is a lack of human resources. We are continually being asked to stretch our skills to cover new tasks, responsibilities, and duties. Through this partnership, we have been able to combine our human resources, skills, and expertise to be more efficient and effective. The sustainability of this partnership has been just as important, along with student and participant satisfaction in the program. One downside to service learning is that it usually ends when the academic semester does, leaving the community organization in a lurch. We have developed a system, dependent on open and frequent communication, that allows us to alleviate this issue, creating ongoing opportunities for all parties involved.
AUTHOR AFFILIATION: Christina Garcia, assistant professor of Spanish, Saint Louis University, christina.garcia@slu.edu (Corresponding Author); Eileen Wolfington, coordinator of Health and Wellness Program, Kingdom House; Barbara Whitaker, instructor, Goldfarb School of Nursing
AUTHOR AFFILIATION: Christina Garcia, assistant professor of Spanish, Saint Louis University, christina.garcia@slu.edu (Corresponding Author); Eileen Wolfington, coordinator of Health and Wellness Program, Kingdom House; Barbara Whitaker, instructor, Goldfarb School of Nursing
Keywords
health and wellness, multi-institutional collaborations, sustainable relationships
Citation
Engaged Scholars, v. 7 (2019).