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28
Posted by benniefinch on March 28th, 2023
Posted in: Blog, Funded Project, NLM Resources
Tags: Member Spotlight
The following is paraphrased from an interview on 3/21/2023.
Jessica Planas, BSN, MPH, PhD, has been a nurse for 25 years with a focus on community and public health and continues her work in a federally qualified community health center. In addition, Dr. Planas holds a full-time position as Associate Professor of Nursing in the Egan School of Nursing and Health Studies at Fairfield University. As a Jesuit University she feels that the University’s approach brings a very humanitarian aspect to their work. The Egan School encompasses nursing, social work, public health, and nutrition and allows for a multidisciplinary approach. She has also been a member of the National Association of Hispanic Nurses (NAHN) for 20+ years, and serves as President of the NAHN Connecticut chapter, which was created in 2010. Dr. Planas loves the work they are doing with the community. The mission of NAHN is to support LatinX nurses to improve the health of Hispanic communities and advocate for access to culturally appropriate quality health care for all. NAHN supports and encourages underrepresented populations to choose nursing as a career, provides mentorship in nursing education, and encourages members to take on leadership roles in nursing. Members are embedded in and connected to the community which helps them to know what is needed in the community and facilitates many partnerships.
When Dr. Planas was working on her PhD, after spending tremendous effort writing a grant proposal that was not funded, she was feeling deflated and frustrated. A mentor shared with her that “A word of encouragement during a failure is worth more than an hour of praise after success.”
She has taken this advice with her in nursing and in teaching, remembering that we should encourage others, especially when things do not go as they might have hoped.
This year, NAHN-CT developed the DIVE-IN (Developing Inclusive Voices and Experiences in Nursing) project. Understanding health disparity, and the need for a diverse healthcare workforce as one way to address this problem, the project seeks to address the lack of diversity in health care professionals and support health equity. The health care professions and especially the registered nurse population is not diverse with people identifying as 81% White, 6% African American, 7.6% Asian, 5-8% Hispanic and less than 1% American Indian and Alaska Native.
Nursing schools are trying to recruit more diverse student populations and are working with high school populations but are finding that this is too late. Jessica Planas and another NAHN-CT member, Maria Krol, put together a program with middle schoolers. Both are Latinas and thought this could provide a diverse face to the role of Registered Nurse. The program allows them to be role models and provide education about the different kinds of jobs nurses can do and nursing specialties. The team developed innovative modules to introduce students to nurses from different backgrounds in 5 areas: Emergency Rooms, Operating Rooms, Pediatrics, Geriatrics, and Community and Public Health. Each module involved a guest speaker who is a nurse from that field and includes developmentally appropriate hands on and educational activities related to those topics. Talking with kids about nursing, they asked “what do nurses do?” The response: “They are a little bit less than a doctor.” Working to shift the narrative, Planas shares, I’m a nurse and I may have more education than some doctors– nurses partner with doctors for the best outcomes for our patients. Nurses work together with doctors, not for doctors. They also encourage students to consider other health professions and describe that there are teams of people working together – and they also encourage students to consider other roles in healthcare where there is also a need to increase diversity. So far, the project has reached 75-80 fifth graders through their programming. They worked with one after school program in the fall and they are currently working with two classrooms in a middle school in Bridgeport, CT. The demographics of the student population are 50% Hispanic, 30% Black and the majority are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
They have received good feedback from the students and found them to be very engaged. She feels this is a great grade to target as they aren’t afraid to ask questions and are very curious, they ask great questions, and are all having a lot of fun.
Two years ago, NAHN-CT was funded to create online community health and health literacy project. Planas has a strong health literacy background and experience with health education initiatives. Lower health literacy is very problematic for certain groups and is associated with poor health outcomes and with misusing healthcare services. Some populations are more disproportionately affected, specifically certain racial and ethnic groups. With the shift in health care delivery to digital methods lower health literacy has an even greater aspect.
For this project, they wanted to work with high schoolers, who use technology so much and are probably using the internet more for health information. While there is lots of available information, they wanted to help them to evaluate health information to see if it is accurate before using it to inform health decisions. They created a one-hour virtual workshop. Focused on working with diverse adolescents, they held 18 workshops with groups of high schoolers across CT and reached about 200 students. Dr. Planas reports that it was really fun and heavily used the MedlinePlus website. “That is my favorite resource.”
Planas states: when you google it, you don’t know what is going to pop up on your screen with whatever X algorithm is currently being used. When you start with MedlinePlus, you will also find links to other information but those are going to be credible and reliable health sources.
“Nurses are uniquely positioned to use community engaged approaches for early intervention and specifically for this, to help adolescents develop health literacy skills.”
The hope is to not just influence them but also their families. NAHN-CT members encouraged the youth in both programs to share this information with their friends and family. They asked participants how prepared they felt to teach others what they learned and 87% felt they could teach others from the workshop and 100% felt they learned a new way to find health information.
Nurses are considered the most trusted health professional and spend the most time with patients out of any health care professional. As nurses, they can leverage this. Nurses tend to have a better understanding of patient needs and challenges and are positioned to engage community members.
MedlinePlus – When you google it, Wikipedia often comes up first. Knowing that you are starting from a credible source with MedlinePlus, the website also pushes you out to other websites, but those connections have been vetted and considered a credible resource. When you google or follow a link, you could wind up with a specific person’s testimony about their experience and you don’t know what you are going to get and if it is a credible source.
Funding has been instrumental moving forward with ideas we have had. MedlinePlus, training and classes, free informational material. The focus on health literacy and health misinformation which aligns with their health literacy initiative. Resources for health care professionals.
Practical – They provide real time information that is useful and meaningful and available.
Our library on campus. The people that work there are the coolest thing. Their willingness to always help and connect the library users with whatever we are looking for even if they have to do some searching and digging on their own to help us figure it out, they are passionate that we have access to the information that we need.
Want to learn more about NAHN-CT’s project working with adolescents? Watch the recording of Region 7 Presents – Lessons Learned: Engaging Teens in Evaluating Online Health Information
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