By Fox23.com News Staff
TULSA, Okla. — University of Tulsa student nurses delivered direct medical care to people experiencing homelessness.
Students with the Student Community Resource Unit For Baseline Support Program (S.C.R.U.B.S.) were at the John 3:16 Mission Thursday in downtown Tulsa.
The students conducted health assessments, provided some health education and connected clients with important resources.
“What made me interested about this is basically how wide of a scope we can go with this project and the aspect of giving back to the community really just spoke to me.” said Meghan Dsouza, a nursing student at The University of Tulsa.
Desouza says it’s important to recognize the disparities that people can experience when dealing with the health care system.
“It is really important to realize that there are systemic issues within health care and those disparities need to be addressed from the root. It’s really important for us to keep that in mind and have empathy as well as an understading of the actual root causes of not getting health care early on that leads to those problems later.”
Cassy Abbott Eng, Associate Dean and Executive Director of the School of Nursing at the University of Tulsa, said the initiative for S.C.R.U.B.S. came out of a need to help better prepare student nurses.
“First we identified we needed a more robust clinical experience for our student nurses,” said Eng. “We spent a lot of times in the classrooms talking about the health disparities, not only of our community, but of our state. We’re 49th in a lot of areas regarding health disparities, so we wanted to take our school of nursing out and make the community our classroom where we can truly be impactful.”
Eng said they started to identify barriers to health care, one of which was transportation so they started the initiative at public transportation routes. They then moved the mobile health units to shelters.
“We’re training and cultivating competent and confident nurses, but being able to have them experience that out in the community as the community as their classroom has been remarkable.”
