NYSP 2011

This post should have been displayed on June 26th.

It is now more than two weeks since the start of the National Youth Sports Program and I have just finished my role as an educator for the camp.  From the beginning, as nursing students we were spit into three groups each with our own education topics including nutrition, self-esteem, and my groups topic being physical activity.  We started each day of camp bright and early and every morning we would take attendance of a specific group of children we were assigned to.  I happened to be the leader of group 12 which included about 25 children, ages 10-12.  Keeping in mind there was a total of about 400 kids, ages ranging from 10-16. Most of the kids met in Adelbert gym, so you can imagine the chaos some days in the crowded and hot gym but we quickly led the children to either their first sports activity or enrichment class.

Enrichment for me included teaching about physical activity and its importance with two other nursing students.  We designed 5 lesson plans that each lasted about 50 minutes which included: BMI, cardiac health, muscles, sports injuries, and sedentary lifestyles.  The hardest part about creating these lesson plans was the variation in ages with the children and tailoring each one to multiple levels of education.  Throughout each day for 2.5 weeks we taught 4 classes and made the lessons as interactive and hands on as possible.  We let the kids play games and do activities such as Simon says to teach the muscle groups, ride that pony (sounds odd, but the kids loved it) to teach about the heart rate, jeopardy, calculating and plotting their own BMIs, and charades just to name a few.

As of today I am enjoying the camp and I can see the positive attitudes and eagerness to learn with most of the children.  Through education I think that we are having an impact on the children and it is evident by the reactions and just interacting with the kids everyday.  We taught about BMI on the first day of camp and I am still having kids reference and talk about the information we taught.  Leaves me with a sense of accomplishment especially with the hard work that I have put into the program.  Also, being with the kids for 7 hours each day all week, you can tell that many of them look up to me, they put trust in me, and even consider me a role model.  I will be continuing the rest of the program coaching and playing football and I hope that my experience will be just as satisfying as the education portion.  

Otis Moss Junior Medical Center

For the Summer Capstone assignment, I am working at the Otis Moss Jr. Medical Center. This health care facility is nothing like I pictured prior to starting the capstone project on June 6th. Otis Moss is a small health care facility with about ten exam rooms, nestled quietly on Quincy Avenue. Otis Moss offers care to OB/GYN, adult, and pediatric patients and often unites the Baptist religious denomination to their care. If I did not have this capstone assignment, I wouldn't know that this place existed. In order to attract more patients and to provide free health screenings to the Fairfax community, a large portion of the semester has been spent on organizing the annual "Live Long Live Strong" campaign.
The "Live Long Live Strong" campaign takes place annually in July and offers hearing, blood pressure, dental, sickle cell, cholesterol, mammogram, and other screening services of this nature to people of all ages. My partner Kana and I have completed the following tasks to help make this event a success: Contacting heath care providers to attend the fair to provide screenings, Calling, emailing, and contacting area businesses for donations to be raffled off as prizes, Organizing the tables, booths, and chairs and creating the maps for set-up purposes, Registering people for the screenings of their choice, Contacting volunteers and organizing the volunteer assignments, and other necessary tasks needed to make this event possible. Although this experience has been enjoyable, it has been a little hard focusing on our main goal of the semester.
After speaking with pharmaceutical representatives from the MERCK Company, Kana and I discovered that Human Papillomavirus (HPV) has high prevalence in the Fairfax neighborhood of Cleveland and is growing throughout Cuyahoga County. Our goal for the semester is to increase vaccination rates for Gardasil in our randomly sampled population size of 100 current Otis Moss patients aged 11-20. The criteria for selecting our patients to be sampled from included that the patient would have to be aged 11-20 male or female, received testing for the sexually transmitted diseases gonorrhea and chlamydia, and would have to be a current patient at Otis Moss. The patients that had a positive result for a previous STD test were considered high risk, while the patients that tested negative were considered low risk. Kana and I then manually screened the patients charts to see if they have received Gardasil, and if so, what stage of the cycle were they in. For those patients who never received Gardasil or who did not complete the cycle, a letter was sent home to the parents encouraging them to get the child vaccinated. Our goal is that the parents respond in a positive way and that our baseline number of vaccinations increases by 5%.
As the semester is coming to a close, this experience has been fun and rewarding. It has opened my eyes to a whole new kind of nursing, community nursing, and has strengthened my organization and people skills. I am looking forward to finishing our data collection for the project to determine if we have achieved our main goal of the semester.

NYSP

This is is a delayed post from June 25th.

For the past two weeks, ten of us nursing students have been tackling (literally and metaphorically) the approximately 400 kids who attend the National Youth Sports Program here at Case. Every morning we tackle the not so easy task of taking attendance in the very loud and hot Adelbert Gym before tackling the next obstacle of transporting the kids to their various activities. Some nursing students started out in their sport, where they play football, softball, volleyball or swimming with the kids as they rotate through each sport. My group, however, started out in the classroom. We are teaching groups of kids ranging from 15-almost 40 students of ages 10-16 about the importance and impact of physical activity. We have lesson plans tailored to each individual class, because each group of kids has its own personality. Some kids are so eager to learn that we can barely contain their enthusiasm in our tiny windowless classroom, while others are completely content to just toss their hoodie over their head and take a nap (which we do not tolerate by the way). By now, we have discovered effective methods of teaching and maintaining order in the classroom. Some things we've done have been Simon Says with the younger kids to help them learn the different muscle groups and Ride That Pony with everyone to show them how exercise increases your heart rate. In order to emphasize the importance of stretching, we did yoga, and to help them understand BMI, we plotted their BMIs on charts and learned some fun chants, too.

So far I am really enjoying my time here at camp, even though by the time I get home I don't have the energy to do anything except shower and sleep. But I can really tell that these kids look up to us as role models and someone they can open up to, so the complete exhaustion isn't all in vain. I'm looking forward to this coming week when we will be switching out of teaching and rotating through our sport. Since I lack athletic ability to put it nicely, Im going to be helping teach dance aerobics-which is right up my alley. I've been asking the kids about dance class and they love it. The instructor is really good- i see him frequently in Adelbert showing off his skills and teaching kids how to breakdance before starting their day. Maybe by the end of this I'll master the headspin thing he's always doing. Probably not though. What I DO know, though, is if a kid gets injured doing the Dougie, Cat Daddy, Thriller, the Wobble, or the Cupid Shuffle, I'll be the first on the scene.

NYSP 2011

National Youth Sports Program is a large summer camp that runs 5 weeks long in Cleveland, Ohio. It is comprised of both sports and educational classes. 400 children, ages 10-16, attend annually. This year we had Lorain and Australian guests. Over the past 5 weeks I have had quite the adventure. I coached football and taught nutrition in the enrichment classes. I have learned so much during this camp.

The campers showed me the ropes. They taught me that respect comes from everyone in everyplace. We basically preach to these young individuals that we deserve respect when trying to coach, teach, or instruct them. They turned it around and stated that many people are not respecting them because they are considered the younger and less experienced. I remember one camper who was asked not to be eating in front of the whole class out of respect for the others. His response was, "Miss Sam, we get up, eat breakfast around 6:30 AM, go to camp, and then don not get feed again until 1 PM. I can not go 6 1/2 hours without eating. Come on now, could you do that?" It was at this point that I realized that these young campers really do put in a full effort in this camp. They make sacrifices just like we do to be here.

This camp comes with both challenges and rewards. I am proud to say that the rewards completely outnumber the challenges. The campers bonded with me and trusted in me to talk about personal feelings. I liked being able to learn about their home life or what they desired in life. Being with the children everyday for 5 weeks gave me first hand experience into what a Public Health Nurse may deal with on a day-to-day basis. I was able to learn to understand not only what the community is thinking about but why they think that particular way. An example shared to me was about the issue of school bullying. One young female stated that she was often a victim of school bullying because she was overweight and wore the same outfits routinely. She expressed that she did not like it but she didn't know how to change anything. In a group discussion about this topic many individuals agreed this was wrong. We talked about hows there are things in life that we can not help. We talked about not judging people for aspects like that. Overall, we had a good group conversation. My only hope is that I made in impact in the campers life as they did mine.

NYSP

This blog was written during our third week of the program, I am just now able to log onto upload it to the blog.
This week I switched from helping teach volleyball to teaching Nutrition with my group. Teaching volleyball was interesting experience. A lot of the campers were not very interested in playing volleyball so that meant I had to be creative to have everyone participate. One of the ways we were able to have everyone participate is by doing drills and games instead of just volleyball games. One of the games we played required teamwork and communication skills. They would toss the volleyball over to the other team and it must be caught - if it was not then whoever was closest would have to sit out. Which ever team ran out of players first lost, the kids really enjoyed the friendly competition.

I was able to work with 2 other awesome staff members and we had a lot of fun together. I was not the greatest volleyball player but the 3 of us worked well as a team, we even played dodge ball against the campers on the last day of camp. Discipline was all of our jobs because a lot of the campers just ran around and would try to play basketball or just sit and talk with their friends. The biggest challenge this far has been keeping all of the campers attentive to the task for the day, but overall it has been a positive experience!

Gila River, Arizona

The first part of this is a delayed post from early June.

One Saturday we got to go to a local Health Fair hosted in a Community Center in District 1. I was excited because I've been spending a lot of time in the school, and was eager to meet more of the community. We met up with a Public Health Nurse for that district and rode over with her, where we then got to help set up a small booth about sun protection and healthcare services. There were several fliers and papers, and also a station for checking blood pressure and blood sugar. Slowly the rows of tables partially filled with other booths, and the rest of the gym filled with community members. They slowly trickled down the row of booths, stopping at each one at least long enough to pick up information. They got a lot of good information, as well as activity books, a water pouch, and lots of pens. We wandered through the row once it had thinned out a little bit and go to see for ourselves what the other booths were. They had one for the Adult Caring House, and the Telecommunications on the reservation, and one for a local program called GENESIS, which is a diabetes prevention program.

Once everyone was settled, there was a short speech by an Elder, who upon finishing, asked all the young people to come forward and serve the Elders the dinner that the Fair was providing. With the guide from our nurse, we then collected meal tickets and orders, and then delivered the box dinner to the appropriate person. I thought that practice was so respectful! Allowing the elders to remain seated, resting and relaxing, while acknowledging their importance to the community.

During dinner there was a presentation, and then I got to hear for the first time, some one talking about the "white man." Jaimie and I were probably one of maybe five white people in the room. I hadn't really noticed that until the speaker made this comment. It was very interesting to hear their perspective on everything. History books are totally skewed, and I know that I don't always remember that.

After dinner they broke up into break out sessions, and I was able to attend a session about local plants and their medicinal properties. That was really interesting because you got to hear how information got passed down from person to person, and the different traditions between family, even though they are all part of the same tribe. After that there was a community dance, so we packed up our booth and left.

More recently, we got to go to another Health Fair in District 6. However, this Health Fair was more 'fair' than 'health.' When we got there, a softball tournament was in full swing (as planned), kids were playing on the playground, and lunch was just about to be served. The 'Health' portion of the fair consisted of a couple of tables next to a sidewalk to pass out information. The rest of the fair included inflatables, a mechanical bull, more vendors of food, and contests, finishing up with fireworks. There was a lot of physical activity and a lot of fun, but a very different experience than I had been expecting. It guess it just goes to show that I should never make assumptions, and that health isn't just about sitting around and talking. Activity is part of it too.

All in all it was a great experience, and I'm glad that we got to see both of them and what they can do for the community.

Finishing NYSP

I have just completed my 5 weeks working for NYSP. I cannot believe it is already over! But even though the time went by very quickly, I feel that my role added significantly to the program. The kids participating in this camp come from backgrounds that offer them limited experiences. For instance, a staff member that also works in the schools commented that many of these kids do not receive physical education classes and many have never played the sports offered in camp. I know this to be true from my prior experiences working in the Cleveland school system. Some campers also have never had health class or learned about anatomy and physiology. Therefore, the health education classes I helped to conduct with my small group were very valuable because the kids were given information they might otherwise never receive.

The program was a fun experience for me too. I love sports, so I was glad to have a chance to participate in some sporting events and competitions. The last week was very fun for me because I enjoyed getting ready for the staff versus camper tournament. I also had fun participating in the extra activities occurring throughout camp. For example, I toured the art museum with the campers, attended a community parade, went to a water park, and learned salsa dancing. Throughout my time at NYSP I made many new friends and formed relationships that I know will help me later on in the future. I learned a lot in this experience about people, nursing, the community, and even about myself.