NUR 303 Module 7 Project Two Project Report Example

Project Two: What Six Wash Days Showed, a Service-Learning Project Report

[Student Name]

Southern New Hampshire University

NUR 303: Service Learning and Civic Engagement

Project Two

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The organization, setting and figures below are a composite written as a model document. No real employer, client, colleague or patient is described.

Project Two: What Six Wash Days Showed, a Service-Learning Project Report

The wash-day health table ran on six Saturday mornings at a neighborhood laundromat, staffed by a registered nurse and the outreach coordinator of the Eastgate Neighbors Association. The Project One plan set four objectives: reach laundromat customers, refer every elevated blood pressure reading, help with health paperwork and connect people to community services. This report compares what happened with those objectives, describes what went wrong and how the partners responded, and reports the partners' decision about the table's future. The short answer is that the table reached more people than planned and worked best at the thing no one expected to matter most, which was helping neighbors read the letters and labels that stood between them and their care. All data are composite figures written for this example.

Results Against the Objectives

Table 1 summarizes the results. Blood pressure readings were categorized using the adult categories in the national guideline summarized by Carey et al. (2018). Counts come from the anonymous tally sheet kept at each session and from a monthly aggregate report the health center shared with the partners.

Table 1

Results of the Wash-Day Health Table Against Project One Objectives

Note. Composite figures written for this example. Elevated or higher includes elevated, stage 1 and stage 2 readings.

What the Numbers Mean

Every target was met, but the targets were set low on purpose, and meeting them shows mainly that the table was used. The more useful findings are in the pattern. Turnout grew from 8 people at the first session to 21 at the sixth, which suggests that word spread through the barber, the tenants' group and regular customers, the channels chosen from the asset map. More than half of the readings were elevated or higher, and 14 people had never been told they had high blood pressure. According to the health center's aggregate report, 9 of the 14 people referred to the held same-week appointments kept them. That is a small number, but it is 9 people with high readings who reached a primary care visit within a week.

Paperwork help was the surprise. Visitors brought insurance renewal notices, prescription labels, appointment letters and, in two cases, hospital bills they believed they had to pay in full. Walking through a document and then having the visitor restate its meaning and the next step took longer than a blood pressure check, often ten minutes, but it was the service people returned for. Teach-back has been effective across a wide range of settings in the published evidence (Talevski et al., 2020), and at the table it also served as a quick check that the explanation had landed.

What Went Wrong and What Changed

Two problems shaped the project. At the first session, only 8 people stopped, and several regular customers said afterward that they had not realized the table was free or that it was for them. The flyers had been printed only in English, although many customers speak Spanish or Vietnamese at home. The coordinator arranged translated flyers and a sign reading free, no forms, no insurance needed in three languages, and turnout rose at the next session.

The second problem was the one described in the Module 6 reflection. At session 2, a man with a reading above 180/110 declined emergency care because he could not miss a shift, and the referral card listed only weekday hours. The health center's response was to reserve a pair of appointments each week for people sent from the table, and to open a Saturday message line that staff check as soon as the clinic opens on Monday. Both changes came from partners and neighbors, not from the original plan, which is the kind of shared learning community partnerships are supposed to produce.

The Partners' Decision

At the review after session 6, the three partners agreed that the table should continue. The health center will assign a community health worker to staff it monthly beginning next quarter, with a nurse from its staff present for blood pressure checks every other month. The association will continue paperwork help, and the owner has offered the same corner of the store. The partners chose a community health worker partly because most of what visitors needed was navigation rather than clinical care. Evidence from a randomized trial suggests that standardized community health worker programs addressing social needs can return more than they cost to Medicaid within a single year (Kangovi et al., 2020), which the health center's director said made the decision easier to defend.

Limitations and Next Measures

This report counts activity, not health outcomes. It cannot say whether anyone's blood pressure improved, whether paperwork help prevented a lost benefit or whether visitors would have found care anyway. Counts were kept by the people running the table, and some visitors may have been counted twice across sessions. If the table continues, two measures would add value without identifying anyone: the share of referred people who report at the next visit that they saw a clinician, and the number of benefit problems the association resolves after a table referral. Collecting even those would require a consent process the project did not have, and the partners agreed that a simple verbal consent script should be written before the health center's staff take over the table next quarter.

Conclusion

Six Saturday mornings are a small project. What they showed is that a laundromat can be a reasonable place for a nurse to meet neighbors, that the most useful help is sometimes reading a letter rather than taking a reading, and that a plan improves when the people it serves are allowed to change it. The partners now own the table, which is the outcome that matters most.

References

Carey, R. M., Whelton, P. K., & 2017 ACC/AHA Hypertension Guideline Writing Committee. (2018). Prevention, detection, evaluation, and management of high blood pressure in adults: Synopsis of the 2017 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association hypertension guideline. Annals of Internal Medicine, 168(5), 351-358. https://doi.org/10.7326/M17-3203

Kangovi, S., Mitra, N., Grande, D., Long, J. A., & Asch, D. A. (2020). Evidence-based community health worker program addresses unmet social needs and generates positive return on investment. Health Affairs, 39(2), 207-213. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2019.00981

Talevski, J., Wong Shee, A., Rasmussen, B., Kemp, G., & Beauchamp, A. (2020). Teach-back: A systematic review of implementation and impacts. PLOS ONE, 15(4), Article e0231350. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231350