March 12, 2020

Mitigating Health Disparities by Providing Education Opportunities that Promote Healthy Living Habits in Preschool Children at Concord Elementary’s Head Start Program

Student Nurses: Ariana Garin, Raeann Ashley Manalang, Jacoby Tisher & Aaron Tu

Nurse Faculty: Ellie Marsh MN, RN

Our team utilized The Nursing Process as the planning framework to learn what health disparities preschoolers were facing at Concord Elementary school. We learned this from our walking/windshield survey, our survey we sent home for families to fill out, but, the most important information we gathered was from our community site mentor. We determined that Education was the Social Determinant of Health we wanted to focus on during our project. With our mentor’s priorities in mind, we created a survey in order to gain vital information for our planning process. We implemented our plan by guiding preschoolers throughout workshops focused on proper hand-hygiene, physical activity and nutritious meal planning. There was a fair amount of preschoolers who preferred to be spoken to in Spanish, knowing this we made accommodations for these students through non-verbal communication, pictures, and help from our site mentor as she also spoke Spanish. The outcome evaluation taught us that it’s important that the healthy living habits we focused on be repeated throughout the year as repetition is important for growth and to form long-term habits. We have made the recommendation to our community site mentor to continue doing our workshops through the year and for the next cohort of nursing students to continue this project. They can continue this project by providing incentive to family members in order to increase the yield of surveys. Per our site mentor’s request, the families and additional staff can benefit from a visual book as a resource to utilize information that was presented during our workshops.