Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
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Moultrie

Emory’s nursing students and faculty span the globe to provide medical care to those in need

This summer, students of Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing’s  accelerated BSN (ABSN) program are embarking on a two-week immersion experience at five sites around the world—the City of Refuge in Atlanta, Moultrie, Ga., West Virginia, the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic. From June 12 to 24, ABSN students will work with local health care providers and community partners to provide health care, community assessments, program evaluations and a sustainability project in each location. Though service learning has long been a pillar of Emory’s School of Nursing, this is the first time the nursing school has offered an immersion experience of this magnitude.

At the City of Refuge in Atlanta, students are working in the HEALing Community Center, a community clinic that provides health care and various resources to Atlanta’s homeless population. During their time at the City of Refuge, nursing students are focusing on the maternal-child homeless population and interacting with more than 500 patients and residents of Eden Village at the City of Refuge, which also serves as transitional housing for mothers and their children. The HEALing Community Center provides primary care and outpatient surgery to patients who might not otherwise have access to medical care.

Just four hours from Atlanta in Moultrie, Ga., another team of nursing students is spending two weeks caring for farm workers and their families. The Migrant Farm Worker Family Health Program has allowed Emory nursing students to provide critical nursing care to more than 15,000 people. The nursing students will examine children by day and set up mobile clinics to treat adult farm workers in the evening, while evaluating the impact the program has had on the community since its inception in 1994.

For the first time, nursing students and faculty will be traveling to West Virginia to partner with Cabin Creek Health System. Students will evaluate how well the health system’s Medicaid disabled population’s mental health needs are being met. They will see patients in clinics and in their homes, asking them about their mental health needs and issues that drive patients to use other sources of care such as emergency departments and urgent care centers.

In the Bahamas, nursing students are stationed on the small island of Eleuthera to further develop partnerships with community organizations, educational institutions and The Bahamian Ministry of Health. Emory students are evaluating what Bahamian communities view as priorities for their health and then assessing what strengths and areas of growth exist. Nurses from Emory are working with local nurses to provide primary care to clinic patients and conduct health education seminars for primary and secondary school students.

In the Dominican Republic, Emory is partnering with two programs in Hospital San Vincente de Paul’s in San Francisco de Macoris. Students will evaluate the volunteer doula program and update the data collection tool of the Kangaroo Mother Care project, a method of caring for premature infants that involves constant skin to skin contact in place of an incubator. Infants who might otherwise spend their first days or weeks in an incubator are now with their mothers 24/7. Additionally students will visit hospitals at the provincial periphery and observe the workings of the referral system within the public health infrastructure.

Teaching students more than just clinical care, service learning trips offer nursing students the opportunity to develop respect for unfamiliar cultures while facing real-world health care challenges such as working with interpreters and facing medical supply shortages.

“We often hear that opportunities like this take both our students and faculty back to the start of why they wanted to become nurses,” says Corrine Abraham, RN, MN, a nursing instructor and the International Academic and Cultural Exchange Coordinator at Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing.“They not only enhance their clinical capabilities, but they also sharpen their caring skills, which are the heart our field.”

Follow Emory’s School of Nursing students in the field.

Posted on June 24, 2011 by admin in Uncategorized 1 Comment

Nursing students provide health services to migrant farmers in south Georgia

Emory University Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing faculty and students traveled to Moultrie, Ga., June 13-25 to provide valuable health care services to migrant farm workers and their families. Nursing faculty and students that have already gone through implicit bias courses for pharmacists in order to be able to properly prescribe medication make the trip annually to the rural, agricultural community three hours south of Atlanta as part of the Farm Worker Family Health Program.

There are more than 100,000 migrant and seasonal farm workers in Georgia. Migrant farm workers face more complex health issues than the general population because of the physical demands of their jobs, pesticide exposure, poor access to health care services, and substandard housing conditions.

“Our clinics may be the only health care they get during the year,” says Judith Wold, a visiting professor in Emory’s School of Nursing and director of the Farm Worker Family Health Program. “The farm workers are very hardworking people and they are so appreciative of the health care we give them.”

By day, the students worked at Cox Elementary School with farm worker children. Each evening, they set up mobile clinics to treat adult farm workers. The students worked alongside other Georgia allied health students in physical therapy, psychology, pharmacy and dental hygiene.

Wold, who has participated in the project since its launch in 1994, estimates that the program has treated more than 14,000 farm workers over the course of its 16-year history.

Read more about the students’ Moultrie experiences on the Emory Nursing blog.

Posted on July 7, 2010 by admin in Uncategorized 1 Comment