Elsevier

Journal of Professional Nursing

Volume 28, Issue 4, July–August 2012, Pages 213-222
Journal of Professional Nursing

Original Articles
Global Health Competencies for Nurses in the Americas

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.profnurs.2011.11.021Get rights and content

This article reports the findings from an online survey of nursing faculty from the United States, Canada, Latin America, and Caribbean countries to identify their perceptions about global health competencies for undergraduate nursing students. A list of global health competencies for medical students developed by the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada Resource Group on Global Health and the Global Health Education Consortium was adapted for nurses and translated from English to Spanish and Portuguese. The competencies were divided into six subscales, and respondents rated each competency on a 4-point Likert scale, with high scores reflecting strong agreement that the competency was essential for undergraduate nursing students. E-mail invitations and links to the online survey were distributed using a nonprobability convenience sampling strategy. This article reports findings only from the respondents to the English and Spanish surveys. The final sample included 542 responses to the English survey and 51 responses to the Spanish survey. Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficients for the subscales ranged from .78 to .96. The mean values for all 6 subscales and for each of the 30 items were greater than 3.0 for the respondents to the Spanish survey, and the mean values for 27 of the items were greater than 3.0 for the respondents to the English survey. These findings suggest that respondents perceived the competencies as essential global health competencies for undergraduate nursing students in the Americas. Narrative comments written by respondents indicate additional competencies and specific concerns about adding additional content to an already full curricula. Results of this study can be used to guide faculty deliberations about global health competencies that should be incorporated in the nursing curricula.

Section snippets

Background

There have been several studies conducted in the past 15 years to identify ways in which nursing programs incorporate international or global health concepts in their curricula. Wright, Godue, Manfredi, and Korniewicz (1998) surveyed representatives from 100 university schools of nursing in the United States plus 15 schools with known international activities (10 from the United States and 5 from Latin America and the Caribbean) to identify the extent to which international health was addressed

Methods

This exploratory descriptive survey was led through a team of faculty members at four Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)/World Health Organization (WHO) Nursing Collaborating Centers: The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), Johns Hopkins University, the National University of Mexico, and the University of Sao Paulo at Ribeirao Preto College of Nursing. The survey developed for the study was adapted for nurses from the GHEC/AFMC Resource Group list of global health competencies for

Findings

The data were analyzed using the PASW Statistics 17 software package. Means and standard deviations were calculated for the items in each of the six subscales and also for each of the 30 competencies. Data for the English and Spanish survey respondents were analyzed separately.

Discussion

Although there have been several other studies examining the extent to which global health concepts are taught in nursing educational programs, to our knowledge, this project is the first survey to identify perceptions of nursing faculty about interprofessional global health competencies that should be addressed in nursing curricula. The quantitative findings indicate that the respondents perceive the adapted GHEC/AFMC competencies as important for undergraduate nursing students. The

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