Rains

The IU East nursing team at Arizona's Canyon de Chelley: back row (left to right) Gwen Demkovich, Billie Gabbard, Colleen Frazier, Polly Watkins, Joanne Rains and Sabrina Short; and front row (left to right) Shelly Burns, Emily Ford and Mary Ann Steinbarger.

To explore the intersection of culture and health, eight registered nurses with significant professional background fulfilled academic course requirements by visiting the geographic center of the Navajo Nation during spring break.

Led by Joanne Rains, dean of the Indiana University School of Nursing division at IU East, the students spent March 9-17 in Chenle, Ariz., the second group of nursing students from the Richmond campus to take part in a community health clinical experience on location."Living and working as guests among the Navajo people was life changing for the nursing students and me," said Rains. "We experienced the stark intersection of culture and the health of populations, and saw community health in the context of geography, economy, politics and tradition. Our experience of the Navajo ways made visible the assumptions in Western health care and healing."

The group worked with public health nurses traveling to homes so remote that they often rode two hours on dirt roads without benefit of signage. Among East's contributions were 90 hours of work reorganizing health records and doing chart audits of immunization status for a residential K-12 Navajo school.

Rains, who earlier this semester was co-recipient of Martin Luther King Jr. Multicultural and Diversity Enhancement Award at IU East, is interested in increasing students' cultural awareness and its impact on health care. The students not only took part in a clinical work experience, but had the opportunity to study the history, culture and practices of Native American medicine.