Matthew Wood, Brigham Young University
Health
Anatomy Academy (AA) is a recently developed school based educational program for fifth graders that uses college age students as small group mentor educators. This program aims to combat child obesity by improving the children’s understanding of nutrition, anatomy, exercise, and healthy behaviors. Our study specifically aimed to evaluate the impact of this mentoring opportunity on student nurses. As the largest population of healthcare workers, nurses play an essential role in patient and family education, especially in well populations. As healthcare costs increase, it will be increasingly important for nurses to actively participate in prevention efforts that empower individuals to develop healthy lifestyles. Currently, there exists a paucity of opportunities for student nurses to practice providing this health teaching to well populations and a lack of research literature on the subject. Anatomy Academy is one of these opportunities and our hypothesis is that there will be positive changes in the self-perceived abilities of the student nurses. After identifying undergraduate nursing students engaged in AA, we collected pre and post (5 scale Likert) surveys asking the nurses to rate their self-perceived ability of their skills to 1) adapt the message to the level of audience understanding, 2) communicate basic physiological concepts, 3) teach and model the link between concepts and health behaviors, 4) empower children toward healthy decisions, and 5) collaborate with organizations, like elementary schools, toward a common goal of helping children maintain healthy BMI and habits. A demographic survey and weekly reflective journals were also collected. Our results found statistically significant results in every perceived skill and we conclude that mentoring opportunities for student nurses in programs like AA improve their confidence and ability to communicate in a nursing role. We recommend that similar opportunities be included in the curriculum of all undergraduate nursing programs.