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On July 3, Semester 3 Bachelor of Science in Nursing students met with the Mobile Outreach Street Health team in the Carleton campus quad to donate the sunscreen and Boost nutritional drinks that their class collected with the support of local organizations.

“This project is about giving back to the community and advocating for equity deserving populations,” says BScN student Katie White.

MOSH is a collaborative primary health care service that services metro Halifax. The donated products will support the health and well-being of MOSH’s clients, who face various challenges including insecure housing, food insecurity, and homelessness.

“Prevention is better than treatment. We want to prevent people from going into the acute care settings, and attack the problem at the root, more of an upstream approach,” says BScN student Ben Barrie.

The project, which is grounded in population health promotion, reflects some of the key concentrations of Dal’s nursing education programs: decreasing health inequity and fostering social justice. Barrie and Marshall Goossen, also a BScN student, explain that population health seeks to investigate and improve the health of entire populations, and concentrates greatly on the social determinants of health and health equity.

“We are working at promoting health, and spreading awareness about what it takes to have healthier communities and populations. We also want to spread awareness that nurses have a broad scope of practice where they can influence the health of communities, not just care for people at the bedside,” says Goossen.

Nutritional drinks, which are packed with protein and vitamins, can function as a meal replacement and sunscreen inhibits the development of various health issues including sunburns, and cancer. The MOSH team will distribute most of the donations from their van, which parks regularly in underserved areas. Harold Cook, MOSH RN (BScN 2011) says that the sunscreen donations will likely last MOSH until next summer, whereas the nutritional drinks tend to go more quickly.

“Everyone at the office was overwhelmed with the amount of supplies the students were able to collect. This will all truly go to very good use,” says Cook.

Overseen by assistant professor in the School of Nursing, Karen Curry, and associate professor Dr. Andrea Chircop, Semester 3 BScN students completed the project as part of their coursework for Population Health Nursing. Students reached out to various local organizations to spread word about the project and arrange the collection of donations.

The students are grateful to the organizations that contributed to the project’s donation collection efforts: Maskwa Aquatic Club, Lawton’s Drugs at Spring Garden Road and Robie Street, Buddy’s Deli, Celtic Corner, First Baptist Church Halifax, Pinkies Thrift of the Prescott Group, and the office staff at Fairley and Stevens Ford in Dartmouth.