Abstract:

Global intelligence and culturally sensitive leadership are central to the University of Saskatchewan, College of Nursing’s comprehensive plan to create a global health initiative. The university’s commitment to aboriginal students, faculty and communities include: student affairs, research programs, community outreach, cultural programs, and academic programs which link our mutual goal of capacity building at the community level. The College of Nursing has created a platform for long distance, robotic-assisted telementoring to reach northern communities of Saskatchewan. Using state-of-the art technology, it is now possible for teachers to remotely work alongside community leaders to build an innovative learning environment for health education. The goal was to address the critical shortage of healthcare workers in rural and remote communities by overcoming many of the barriers to accessing continuing education and health services by offering students the opportunity to obtain a first class education without having to leave their communities. While health human resource planning may have been the driving force, the common outcomes are improved health quality outcomes, professional development locally and leadership for community development based on a sustainable northern workforce. An additional, powerful outcome is the extension of telementoring to health care delivery in the north. This model provides a compelling approach for interprofessional collaboration between education and community-based health care practices for northern and remote regions. We will be able to test the feasibility of long-distance telementoring in health education by providing access to expert researchers and scholars in real time to learners in remote classrooms.This initiative captures the political will for social change currently transcending all borders – collegial, institutional, provincial and national. The outcome of this initiative is the application of new knowledge that can be directly applied to improving access to health education and service delivery of indigenous people within Saskatchewan and abroad. A potential benefit is connecting telementors globally to transform health education, enhance service delivery and improve health quality outcomes.

This approach has transformed the delivery of education to prepare the next generation of professionals and leaders for Saskatchewan, Canada and our global communities. Establishing the remote telementoring platform as a means of removing geographical barriers to support students to learn where they live requires the development of a systematic approach for testing the proficiency, performance competencies and satisfaction of student learners using the remote telementoring program. This paper will discuss the framework used to conduct a financial analyses of the remote presence teaching method as compared to face to face and blended models of nursing education, describe the extent to which learners feel faculty are accessible and engaged in their learning using remote presence telementoring and describe faculty’s experiences in using remote presence telementoring for nursing education.

Keywords:

Remote presence, nursing, telementoring, community.