Community Based Health Care Highlighted With New Partnership Program
Carol L. Boas, Nu’77 and Andrew M. Boas’ generous 2018 gift to Penn Nursing will create the Boas Community Partnership Program—and establish a permanent linkage from Penn Nursing into the Philadelphia communities we serve.
April 09, 2018
Penn President Amy Gutman’s Penn Compact 2020 laid the groundwork for continuing efforts to make the University of Pennsylvania more inclusive and diverse, and with the Boas Community Partnership Program, Penn Nursing will have a built-in engagement mechanism embedded in local communities that will influence community health and knowledge of nursing education opportunities.
The Boas Community Partnership Program model’s key hallmark will be community engaged learning—understanding that students can’t learn about community nursing from a textbook, and so should be experiential. The goal of the program is threefold: to design and integrate community-based models for clinical education that will increase expert capacity for organizations; to increase community-based work experiences for nursing students; and to develop a pipeline of well-prepared students compelled to use their expertise in community settings both as learners and as future health professionals.
The need to train primary care providers of the future in community-based models of care has never been more important, nor has the opportunity to affect the health of the population been so great. Thanks to the Boas’ incredible leadership at Penn Nursing, we can meet these needs and opportunities head on.
