Exploring Significant Impacts of Global Health on Nursing Education and Resource-Poor Communities: An Integrative Literature Review

Exploring Significant Impact of Global Health Experienced by Nursing Educators: An Integrative Literature Review

Elizabeth Del Cimmuto & Kimberly Elkayam

Faculty Sponsor: Young-Me Lee, PhD, RN

Background: Nursing education in the United States is largely focused on health promotion at the local and community level. Modern advances in communication technology have facilitated a movement in nursing to gradually adopt a global health perspective in both practice and education.

Objective: to explore what research has been done regarding how nurse educators are impacted by adopting global health perspectives in nursing education and to suggest one potential way to add to this body of knowledge using a survey-based approach.

Methods: This integrative literature review was conducted using keywords “global health, nurse faculty, nursing education, service-learning, and nursing volunteerism” to search the literature between 2007 and 2017.

Results: This study found that recent trends in nursing education are migrating towards a more global perspective as opposed to the more commonly utilized community health perspective. Benefits of adopting a global health perspective include strengthening of several core nursing competencies and increased cultural competency in nursing students.

Conclusions: Despite the existing literature focusing on the impact of service-learning and global health perspectives in nursing on students, a knowledge gap appears to exist in the literature regarding the impact of adopting a global health perspective on nurse educators. By developing a survey designed specifically for nurse educators who have participated in service-learning abroad, future research may be guided in order to add this missing information to the existing knowledge base regarding the impact of global health perspectives on nursing education.

Keywords: global health, nurse faculty, nursing education, service-learning, nursing volunteerism, global health objectives, technology