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Cross-Cultural Nursing Experience: Jamaica
With increased awareness of the impact of globilization on health care delivery, many nursing programs are instituting study abroad programs that allow their students to care for more diverse populations. Cross-Cultural Nursing Experience: Jamaica began at the University of Iowa College of Nursing in May, 1998. Each May since then, approximately 12 students have traveled to Morant Bay, Jamaica where they observe and assist with health care delivery at Princess Margaret Hospital and several health care clinics in surrounding St. Thomas Parish. The primary objective is to immerse the students in a new culture and to expose them to a health care delivery system that functions quite well with significantly less technology and fewer resources than in the United States.
St. Thomas Parish is the poorest and most rural parish on the island. Students live with health care professionals in a building on the hospital grounds. They observe and work with the health care providers for the three weeks that they are in residence. They also spend two days and nights out in the rural areas of the parish living with Jamaican families, making home visits on foot with the parish public health nurses.
Providing health care in a developing country means having
to function with minimal supplies and technology.
Through the Jamaica experience, students learn ways of providing care when technological resources are not available. As one student remarked, "People need care from the holistic perspective,
not just technology, not just medicine. Caring for someone at Princess Margaret Hospital involved
actually caring for them, and caring about them, because the technology
wasn't there."
