Students link mothers to resources

For their health promotion clinical practicum with Catholic Social Services (CSS), seniors leveraged social media to connect CSS and mothers in an underserved area of Philadelphia and nearby Chester, Pa.

Senior Tiffany Cedar describes her work in spring 2015 with clinical partner Kathryn Dolan and classmates Sara Lamp and Kelsey Byrne, under the guidance of Assistant Professor Elizabeth Petit de Mange, PhD, MSN, NP, RN, creating two Facebook pages for CSS as part of their community project in which they had to assess their assigned community, identify a problem, and develop an evidence based intervention to combat the problem. Tiffany says, “Our community was the group of women who attend prenatal and parenting classes at the Chester and Southwest Philadelphia locations of CSS. The social worker and staff said they were in need of a way to connect with the surrounding community to obtain referrals to their classes and disseminate information about their classes to new and existing members. We compiled a list of community resources, such as hospitals, pediatricians, parenting and prenatal support groups that CSS could connect with to increase the participants in their class.  We created a pamphlet for each of the locations which highlighted the services that they offered. Lastly, we started two Facebook pages for CSS that will allow the community to easily obtain information about the services offered.” At press time, the pages were under internal review by CSS before being published.

Dr. Petit de Mange notes that the students also taught classes including topics such as signs and symptoms of autism, how to differentiate between real and false labor and stress management.

Another CSS clinical placement was Philadelphia’s Mercy Hospice, where seniors Erica Campbell and Jacqueline Cembrook were challenged in a very different way while working with a population of women who are homeless. The students gathered information about available health resources and compiled it in a portable way so that women who came to Mercy Hospice for lunch could easily carry it out. The agency was also given copies.