The School of Nursing & Health Innovations was awarded the 2023 Service Award at the Blanchet House annual Lending a Helping Hand Brunch. In addition to the familiar volunteer services of food, shelter, and companionship (helping hands) for the homeless in the city of Portland, the Service Award highlights the added-value difference that only Nursing volunteers provide: foot-care clinics and assistance in staffing the Harrington Health Clinic.
Health Care is community care. On-site at Blanchet House in downtown Portland since 2020, the Harrington Clinic provides transient and displaced clients a point-of-entry to health care. Here client and health care system are afforded a gentler and earlier direct nurse-led gateway offering primary care and screenings in the hope of circumventing crisis intake at the Emergency Room or Urgent Care Center later. Both the cost savings and the humanity of this approach are transparent. Partnership with UP nursing students makes this innovative intervention happen.
Parish Nurse Brochures, 1998 and 2008
Community-based care interventions are not new or recent to The School of Nursing & Health Innovations. Nurse-volunteers creating community clinics to provide immediate direct patient care for the Portland homeless is documented already in the early 1990s when nursing students helped create clinics and foot-care services at St. Andre Bessette Parish / The Downtown Chapel. Also during the 1990s and into the 2010s, the School of Nursing partnered in an Introduction to Parish Nursing certification. Through the years different innovations arise to meet changing social conditions. That is, we find neighborhood nursing programs hosted in various community-based settings. Since 2016 community engagement has included placing nursing students at four high schools in the Portland area: the Rosemary Anderson High School (RAHS) partnership includes instruction and conversation with at-risk youth and the larger school population.
Community health care initiatives have always been woven into the character and curriculum of nursing education, these innovative partnerships are on-going and continuing today (and beyond) at the University of Portland extending the halls of education into the city with programs such as the Harrington Health Clinic and the Integrative Health Coaching program.
Related Links
Community Programs (School of Nursing & Health Innovations website)
Nurses are Superheroes (PortLog article)
A Given Life: A Center for Social Concern (PortLog article)
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