Preconception Peer Educators' exploratory outreach to the Bahamas: A foundation for an international service learning initiative.

A service learning outreach was undertaken to assess the feasibility of adapting the Preconception Peer Educator (PPE) program to Bahamian youth. By focusing on preconception health, the PPE program is a logical step toward ensuring age sensitive and developmentally appropriate education to improve potential birth outcomes and decrease infant mortality rates (IMR) associated with the complex societal problems on Grand Bahama. Concerned with the prevalence of adolescent pregnancy, lack of social support, depression, and failure to complete high school, a nurse midwife invited PPEs from a School of Nursing to meet with stakeholders to introduce the PPE program to Bahamian youth.

Students' experience of nursing presence with poor mothers.

An awareness of the health impact of poverty is core to effective nursing practice. Consequently, a clinical course for nursing students, the focus of which was the impact of poverty upon mental, physical, and spiritual health, was developed and implemented. As the students' understanding of poverty developed, they appreciated that a nurse's spirituality and nursing presence can empower poor and marginalized mothers.

Finding spirituality and nursing presence: the student's challenge.

The concepts of spirituality and nursing presence are difficult for nursing students to comprehend, identify, and apply. Yet holistic nursing practice obligates nurse educators to teach students about these abstract concepts. The purpose of this article is to describe a nursing faculty's approach to encourage baccalaureate students to explore and develop an understanding of the concepts of spirituality and nursing presence in light of their clinical practice.

A different kind of clinical experience: poverty up close and personal.

Nursing faculty are faced with the dilemma of how to teach the complex health and social issues about poverty to students because most nursing students have limited exposure to the impoverished. A seminar-driven clinical experience at a crisis center was implemented to address this challenge. Preclinical and postclinical exposure questions helped both students and faculty alike identify growth in students' awareness of social responsibility, client advocacy, and ethical issues.