A yearlong population health internship: Operationalizing an innovative model for population health nursing education

In recent years, evidence has emphasized the critical role that nurses play as public health leaders and the urgent need to prepare nurses for interprofessional collaboration in fulfilling those roles. Sharing best practices in population health nursing education is especially critical now, in the era of COVID-19, when more nurses will be called to apply public health principles to patient care regardless of their work setting. Although evidence from national nursing education bodies outline several critical implications for nursing curricula, undergraduate nursing programs lack operational guidance for instituting effective curricular changes to population health nursing teaching and learning. The purpose of this paper is to outline the process by which a college of nursing translated this evidence into innovation through program development of a yearlong Population Health Internship (PHI) in its BSN program. The inaugural PHI cohort placed 81 nursing students in 19 population health agencies to work with 64 interprofessional mentors. The author details the six steps taken to operationalize the curricular innovation to enable replication by others. Initial student evaluation data show participation in the PHI enables positive mentor relationships and exposes students to roles of population health nurses and the scope of their activities. Community agency evaluation data indicate satisfaction with the yearlong model, noting that nursing intern contributions extended agency missions.