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Is a clinical experience in maternal child health critical to the education of baccalaureate nursing students?

In my opinion, the answer to this question is a resounding yes! Clinical experiences across populations have been a hallmark of nursing education. It has been the accepted norm that for students to operationalize the knowledge, attitude, and skills presented in a content area, they must have the opportunity to apply the concepts in a real-time setting. It has been this rationale that supports linked didactic-clinical course sequences (Association of California Nurse Leaders, 2010). However, the importance of clinical experiences in maternal child health (MCH) is for students to have the best opportunity to conceptualize patients within the context of the family. Nursing care touts the importance of the family as part of patient-centered care, but it is only in MCH clinical experiences that this option is consistently available. Students in the progression to becoming nurses work hard to fully understand that they should include the family as part of patient care. But, for the most part, the opportunity to implement this is “hit or miss,” and it is possible for students to complete an entire clinical rotation without ever conferring with a family member on a treatment plan, next steps, or expected outcomes. It is only in the MCH clinical experience that the family is an assured component. This is the only experience that consistently showcases that the “patient” is part of a family. Even for the most naive of students or in the poorest of clinical environments, most likely the student will have to confront including the family in care planning to ensure positive outcomes. Even if the graduate nurse never practices in MCH, the lessons learned from working with a family is the key take-away. Family-centered care is one of the hallmarks of quality nursing and a fundamental aspect of interprofessional practice (Interprofessional Education Collaborative, 2011). Interactions with patients can be simulated, a one-to-one relationship with a standardized patient can take on a great deal of realism, but involvement in the very real dynamics of a family can only take place in the clinical setting. The fact that students have positive experiences with newborns and their parents or form a special bond with a pediatric patient is a wonderful by-product of a required MCH experience. However, the key component to this argument is that nursing students confront issues of the family as part of any care or treatment protocol. Only in MCH experiences is this impossible to avoid. The importance of a MCH experience is the lynch-pin in making the case that the care of any population must include the family (Duran Oman, Abel, Koziel, & Szymanski, 2007). Including MCH clinical experiences with moms, babies, pediatric patients, and their families are essential if not foundational aspects of quality nursing education and are experiences that are not available in the classroom or simulation.