Brigham Young University College of Nursing professor Barbara Mandleco recently returned from Russia, where she attended a workshop for nurses, mentoring them in creating research projects for completion during the upcoming calendar year. Mandleco was part of a team of six American nurses who participated in the workshop as mentors.
The research workshop had the two-fold goal of providing the Russian nurses an opportunity to examine key questions and issues regarding the care of patients and to design projects that use evidence-based practice for improvement in patient care, she said.
Mandleco mentored four separate groups of researchers who will look at how children cope with addressing change, separation in children, immunization intervention training and an evaluation of continued education offerings in the workshops’ host city, Arkhangelsk, which is located near the White Sea, one and a-half hours northeast of St. Petersburg by plane and 200 miles from the Arctic Circle.
“A lot of the topics they are looking at are old news here, but they are exciting to the Russian nurses,” Mandleco said. “The type of research questions they came up with tells you that they don’t have a lot of our information. Most of our nursing journals are in English so there is the difficulty of translation.”
The challenge now, Mandleco said, is to follow up with the excitement generated at the workshop and continue to support the Russian nurses in their research.
“It was a wonderful experience to get to know the people, feel their passion and see their interest,” Mandleco said. “The nurses were engaged in the workshop. It was great to work with students who wanted to learn.”
Writer: Aliso Williams
