Student nurses bring health care to the Nashville Flea Market
Janel Shoun-Smith |
Nursing students establish flea market health booth to reach the underserved
Nashville residents have a new conduit for health information; not at the doctor, but while shopping at the flea market.
This past February through April, Lipscomb senior nursing students Richard Hunnicutt and Corina Picchiottino set up a health consultation and information booth at the Nashville Flea Market, in an effort to reach overlooked and underserved populations in the community. Health science students from nursing and pharmacy manned the booth each month this spring. As of May, the booth was manned by home health care agency AdvanceCare Health Services. It is their goal to partner with other local university nursing programs to provide experts at the information booth each month in the future.
Hunnicutt and Picchiottino developed and implemented the Nashville Flea Market Community Outreach program as their capstone project in the SALT Program (Serving and Learning Together), Lipscomb’s service-learning program that requires students to collect service hours for graduation and coordinates students who would like to become SALT Scholars by conducting a semester-long service project.
It was important to the two students to create a new outlet for health information that would continue after their senior semester was completed. They both graduated in May as SALT Scholars. So in May, they turned operation of the booth over to AdvanceCare, which was working this past spring to find other partners.
To ensure that accurate information is always provided no matter who is manning the booth, the students created a yearlong supply of informational brochures on various topics relevant to the season, including flu and cold season, smoking cessation, cardiovascular health and maternal and pediatric care. They also created implementation guidelines and a question algorithm that someone without a health care background could use to answer shoppers’ health questions.
“Our goal was to never turn away an individual without answering a question,” said Hunnicutt. “We even had a Centers for Disease Control web link on the materials so someone could print off relevant info and hand it to the patient.”
Shoppers are attracted to the booth with the offer of a free blood pressure check. Hunnicutt said the presence of Bryan Davis and Shona Paul, two Lipscomb student pharmacists, was crucial to providing a wide range of health information to shoppers.
“We both were optimistic and hopeful for the impact that we would make on the population at the Nashville Flea Market, but never anticipated the immense positive reception to the project,” said Hunnicutt. “Seeing the real impact each month, not just on an individual basis, but also on the community as a whole, made this entire project worthwhile.”
Funding for the booth rental was provided by AdvanceCare.