June 17, 2005
Kathleen Walsh Spencer
Plastic Surgical Nursing
4560 Stoneleigh Road
Bloomfield Hills, MI 48302
Subject: Bilingual Structured Patient Education
Dear Kathleen Walsh Spencer:
Our mutual friend, Barb Coslow, RN, our preceptor for our BSN completion program, suggested that I write to you and let you know about the senior project that was just compiled for the BSN completion program for University of Detroit Mercy. Our project, Breast Health: Are You Aware, was a two-fold project. Our first goal was to inform/teach women, from teens to old age, the importance of breast health awareness; of health practices that would enable them to recognize and treat breast cancer; and to increase awareness of current low cost or free state diagnostics available to them for early detection of breast cancer, which will also decrease the disparity of care among minorities. The second goal is to make more instructors at UDMercy aware of Covenant Community Care and the important work that this organization does for the working poor of Mexican Village.
We chose to obtain breast models from American Cancer Society to use at our presentations. We felt the women would benefit from actually doing a breast exam so they would know how deeply to palpate a breast to find all the lumps. There were a variety of sizes and "feels" to the tissue being palpated. Some of the lumps felt fatty, whereas others were smooth. We also obtained many different pamphlets in English and Spanish in large quantities so we could leave the material at Covenant Community Care for future use. A third option for our group was coordinating our program with the arrival of the Karamanos Mobile Mammogram so we would have access to the largest number of women that we could. We also advertised the event at both locations in order to inform as many women as we could of the resources available to them.
We administered a pre- and posttest in English and/or Spanish for the women to take so we could get accurate results for how much learning took place. We had 12 pre- and posttests that were returned to us. Of the 88 questions posted in the pretest, we had 87.5% correct, whereas the posttest had the same 88 questions with 97% correct. So we increased the knowledge base of the women significantly-fantastic results and something we are very proud of.
Both Ferndale First United Methodist Church and Covenant Community Care were deeply appreciative of our interest and care we displayed to their clientele. FUMC took extra pamphlets to another group within the church called "Chronic Care," which deals with many health concerns of this elderly population. Covenant Community Care kept all the pamphlets that we had for English/Spanish for distribution to their population, along with our pre- and posttest for use.
Final recommendations for this project are to keep funneling UDM students into this medically underprivileged and underserved population. We gave our guest teachers and our instructor a video presentation of Covenant Community Care to take back to the university to share with other professors and teachers.
Respectfully
Margie Romanoski, RN