N is for Nursing Young Hearts

Heart disease can strike at any age, but for most, it flares into view long after the dash and dreams of grammar school. Yet it is precisely during these young years when healthy habits take shape, or conversely, when bad habits become a lifelong pattern.

Acute care nurse practitioners at the UCSF Medical Center see the consequences of the latter choice every day. Now, thanks to an educational outreach pilot project with the American Heart Association (AHA) and the San Francisco Unified School District, nursing students at UCSF are tackling heart disease at its roots — among school-age children.

The pilot is the brainchild of Jill Howie, director of UCSF's acute care nursing practitioner program, who, with the help of the AHA's Youth Market director, Julia Clare, teamed to bring UCSF nursing students into nine San Francisco schools last spring.

The goal was to teach San Francisco's ethnically diverse students in grades one through five the benefits of a healthy lifestyle and eating habits. As Howie explains, learning proved to be a two-way street.

"Nurse practitioners spend so much time focused on in-house, technical aspects of health care, particularly with very sick patients, that the faculty felt it was important to reach out to people who were not critically ill." Alisa Yee, an acute care nursing student, welcomed the chance to freshen and refocus her message.

"Teaching kids made me realize that not everyone thinks [about heart disease] at our level and that there are other people we need to think about besides really sick patients."

Having fun with stories and games made a difference too. On the first visit, nurses performed a skit to demonstrate the flow of blood in the heart. During the second visit, they staged a relay race with canned goods to teach about the food pyramid.

The message was preventive care, but the package was all bright colors and good times - an important selling point to children who will readily tune out an overly pedantic discourse.

The nursing visits had another objective as well: to teach young children about nursing as a career. The current nursing shortage, coupled with both an aging population and an aging cadre of nurses nationwide, makes recruitment essential.

Says Howie, "By the time kids are in high school, it is often too late to influence their career path." Indeed, part of the education process was to have the nursing students visit in pairs, and to feature male nurses as role models.

Only time will tell if the visits and the impressions made a lasting difference. In the belief that they do,

Howie and the AHA are evaluating the pilot and fine-tuning its details in the hope of one day making it as regular a part of grammar school as science projects and spelling bees.

by Jeff Wilson