Pedagogical innovation to establish partnerships in adolescent health promotion: lessons from a Scottish undergraduate nursing programme

Nurses have an established and expanding role in health promotion in support of public health strategies to reduce health inequalities, refocus health care on prevention, and rebalance responsibility for health toward individuals. However, evidence suggests that nurses may be unclear about the content and lack the skills to conduct health promotion. Education has been identified as an important vehicle to increase nurses’ competence and confidence in health promotion, and health promotion is a required component of undergraduate nurse education in the United Kingdom. This article presents a pedagogical innovation that enabled undergraduate student nurses in Scotland to research and rehearse health promotion to raise adolescents’ awareness of risk-taking behaviors. Student nurses completed a 2-week group-work project to develop a resource (e.g., mobile app, poster, lesson plan) targeted toward an adolescent risk behavior (e.g., self-harm, unsafe sex, alcohol misuse). The project culminated with a public “marketplace” event where students showcased their resource and obtained professional, peer, and public feedback. Opportunities afforded by the national curriculum for high school pupils enabled partnerships in adolescent health promotion to be established through involvement of pupils from a local secondary school with an interest in health care careers. School pupils participated in focus groups where students “pitched” their resource and appraised students’ work at the marketplace. This article shares the design and delivery of this project to enable replication or adaptation by health educators elsewhere and offers reflections on perceived project outcomes from the perspective of student nurses, school pupils, and nursing faculty.