We had the opportunity to spend a morning discussing and following along with 4th year nursing students from Mahasarakham University. We met the students at their clinical site for this semester. This semester they are within a community, where they live for 26 days together, while learning and crunching data about the people the community, to determine their main health promotion goal. They spend approximately 5 days assessing and following government documents to determine what the main issues are within the community (ex: hypertension, diabetes, addiction) then create a presentation on the top issues within the community. From there, the students gather the community and present their data to the them, and allow the community to vote on which topic they believe the community needs health promotion on. We found this fascinating and very impressive. The communities are small, with very little resources, many living in very poor conditions. The students evaluate everything, from income, living situation, to mental health and behaviours of these individuals in the community.
After learning about their project, we had the chsnce to discuss similarities and differences within our community back home versus theirs, our health system versus theirs, as well as nursing student difficulties (which we found were very similar).
It it was a huge eye opener for us to teach about programs in our communities that they have never heard of, such as Needle Exchange Programs, Addictions/Rehabilitation Clinics, MAID, and the homeless population.
We learned lots from each other and will carry it with us for our future career. Thai Nursing Students are very knowledgeable and follow the same systematic Nursing Process that we follow back in Canada. The nursing process is very universal which is very comforting and useful when travelling around the world.
We look forward to hearing how their project went, and what the health promotion topic will be for each group of students!
