When reach exceeds touch: Student experiences in a cross-sector community-based academic-practice partnership.

Objective: A partnership between three nursing programs, multiple high-needs public school districts and a local asthma coalition was developed as a way to build shared capacity aimed at improving health outcomes for children with asthma. This article explores student perceptions of their clinical experiences teaching asthma self-management within a regional cross-sector, community-based, multi-site academic-practice partnership.

Design: Nursing faculty from three Long Island, New York-based nursing programs within the partnership jointly created a qualitative focus group methodology to more fully understand the phenomena of interest. A set of open-ended interview questions guided the sessions.

Sample: Through purposive sampling, 42 undergraduate nursing students participated in 60-min focus group sessions.

Measurement: Focus group data were transcribed. Content analysis, coding, and theme development was carried out collaboratively. The unit of analysis was the individual participant responses informed by group interaction. A researcher diary was maintained.

Results: One overarching theme and three sub-themes emerged from the data, reflecting student understandings in the areas of positioning, professional/personal identity, and social awareness. Ongoing analysis revealed patterns across the data sets linking student learning and the goals, milieu and workings of the partnership.

Conclusions: Findings suggest that the context of a thriving community-based academic-practice partnership, established to improve population health outcomes, offered unique clinical learning opportunities for students through exposure to the values, ideas, and innovation of the partnership itself.