Throughout this semester, our team had the privilege of collaborating with the Healthy Growth and Development team at Ottawa Public Health. Our project revolved around the conception and design of readily accessible and comprehensive resources in the form of Wiki pages. These resources were meticulously crafted to encompass a wide spectrum of essential information concerning the intricacies of housing in Ottawa. This included, but was not limited to, details on subsidized housing, housing benefits, the shelter system, and a collection of invaluable general information tailored to the needs of the OPH staff.
Reaction All Years
Our community health project is a health career fair for the students of All Saints Catholic High School in Kanata. The career fair took place on November 21st from 8:30-11:00, teachers would bring down their class and have 20 mins to allow the students to walk through the fair, about 300 students walked through. Our career fair had several occupations including Paramedic, Physician’s Assistant, Massage Therapist, Physiotherapist, Registered Nurse, Dental Hygienist, Nursing Students, SHSM Teachers, Laboratory Technologist, Medical Students, and Chiropractor. The students had a passport which required them to answer questions about the different careers regarding what they learned and what inspired them.
Our project’s end goal was to collect a minimum of 100 new volunteers aged 17-35 to join the Stem Cell Registry. To achieve this, we were tasked with setting up a booth in a high-traffic area at Algonquin Collage. In addition to our assigned tasks, we took the initiative to facilitate informational presentations to classes of nursing students.
The purpose of this community health project was to develop client-centred trauma-informed care templates to ensure that clients receive appropriate care when presenting to the hospital. These templates will be integrated with The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) electronic medical record called EPIC. A major issue facing the clients at the hospice was the fact that when the clients must go into the hospital, they are not cared for using a trauma-informed care approach. The students created a template that can be individualized for each client and has several “prompts” that can be filled out to ensure proper care is provided while in the hospital.
The purpose of our project was to increase heart health knowledge in low socioeconomic female populations. We collaborated with St. Joe’s Women’s Centre to put up a “Women’s Heart Health Week ” bulletin board with educational information such as signs and symptoms of heart disease, resources one can use regarding heart health, and heart healthy prevention activities one can do. We included feedback sheets and cut out hearts that women could comment on to assess their knowledge.
We completed our practicum at Cornerstone an organization that provides supportive housing for women. Over the course of our placement we participated in a variety of events such as painting, carving pumpkins, and making ice-cream sundaes in order to build rapport with the residents. We collected primary data through interviews in order to find an issue on which to build our intervention off of. We identified anger management as something the residents were looking for support with. We then created and successfully implemented a workshop that highlighted tools and strategies to use when coping with anger.
The project identifies gaps in the current practices and policies of the facility. The RNAO best practice guidelines were used to evaluate the facility policies. From the gap analysis, important gaps were identified such as education, communication and collaborative needs that, when addressed, could help promote better health outcomes for residents.