Community Collaboration
Nursing flourishes through community partnerships and Center research skillfully combines resources from professional and community networks to help individuals and families manage illness.
As an Exploratory Center, the contributions of our community partners like In-Shape Fitness and Venus Gym brought exercise intervention sites to breast cancers survivors. The gyms offered easy access in the communities where survivors live and work, helping them to normalize the experience of performing routine exercise in their recovery. In 2005 the Yale Center for Excellence in Chronic Illness Care acknowledged their contributions in research and health by awarding them with Excellence in Caring in Chronic Illness Awards.
In the photo above, award recipients from In-Shape Fitness and Venus Gym are featured with YSN faculty and Center staff.
Community partnerships with Fellowship House, a supportive housing and recovery facility in New Haven, helped the Center access men and women with serious mental illness to advocate their needs for nursing interventions that could promote their physical and general health.
The center's professional affiliations with the Connecticut Mental Health Center, the YNNH General Center for Clinical Research, the Yale Pediatric Endocrinology Section, and the Health Education Research Outcomes for Survivors of Childhood Cancer (HEROS)
Clinic offer unique opportunities both to connect with families and to expand the clinical practice of self and family management under the purview of research.
In our work as a Core Center, new relationships with communities in need are increasingly emerging. The Center has begun to build visibly in the community outreach by bringing our expertise into a middle school health fair project, and through collaboration with a regional hospice council.
Fostering community and professional relationships is essential to meeting the needs and challenges of developing nursing interventions for vulnerable populations. Combined with the multiple resources offered by the Yale Center, our research gives rise to new
practices that involve and guide community participation and input from a project's inception through its dissemination.
|
