Community engagement by university nursing schools: Survey and case studies

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to describe the results obtained from the survey on the involvement of university schools in community engagement and to share the descriptions of exemplary community engagement projects, each selected from the different categories of universities, i.e. research-intensive university, research-teaching balanced university, comprehensive university and a university of technology. The results show that of the ten schools who responded, all were engaged in communities around them, with projects to improve health services being most common (22 projects), followed by projects to promote health and prevent illness (29 projects). The least popular were projects to develop policy (only 2) and projects to develop new services (8 ). On average, between 10 and 29% of academics from each school were involved in the different types of community activities. The number of projects per school varied between 1 and 18. The more detailed project descriptions provide a picture of valuable projects both in terms of scope and duration, benefiting communities and schools. The projects often involved research.