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In the winter 2008-2009 academic quarter, 35 students from Louisiana Tech Division of Nursing implemented a community service learning project targeting Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS). Service learning integrates the goals of academic instruction with civic engagement within the community to produce a service-focused, community-campus partnership. This collaboration benefits the student as well as the community that is served, engaging students in civic involvement while enhancing their academic curriculum. These students are responsible for contacting a community agency, planning, scheduling, and implementing a service project that targets areas of health education that would be of benefit to the participating community members, ending with evaluation and reflection upon completion of the project.

Students enrolled in Nursing 212, Child Health Maintenance, implemented fourteen SBS service learning education projects to eight parishes in Louisiana, impacting 255 participants. The sites in which the projects were implemented impacted EMS/firefighting personnel, day care center employees, and high school students enrolled in a parenting/life choices component of their academic curriculum. The majority of these participants were high school students, with the aspiration that this instruction will make an impact for these future parents and babysitters, with regard to care of crying infants. SBS is a devastating form of child abuse that too often occurs due to ineffective parental coping skills, and may go undiagnosed unless a fatality occurs, generating publicity. In Northwestern Louisiana, seven SBS fatalities have occurred in the past nine years. Overall statistics for the state average one SBS death out of 33 cases of child abuse fatalities for the last three documented years. One documented case may mask numerous cases that go undetected, with visual or neurological damages resulting, that may take several years to fully make itself apparent. Education is essential to prevent SBS, with relevance to a frustrated parent or caregiver’s response to an infant’s cry.

The SBS service learning project education utilized a SBS simulation mannequin with realistic infant features, accompanied by curriculum, pre and post tests to discern knowledge of SBS, and presentation resources that were funded by an Louisiana Tech University College of Applied & Natural Sciences Innovative Instruction Grant in the fall of 2009 written by Nursing 212 faculty Tanya Sims, Assistant Professor, and Donna Hood, Professor, in the Division of Nursing. Participants were given an opportunity to see the areas of the brain damaged   with various degrees of shaking. Flashing lights depict the damage to vision, personality, memory, and motor functions. The impact of this method of education received positive evaluations from participants, as well as the students who implemented the service learning projects. Agency evaluations unanimously reported that these projects bennefitted the community sites in which the students presented the service learning education on SBS.

Service learning embodies the concept of academic instruction with civic responsibility. It is the hope that the impact made through the nursing student / community connections in this SBS prevention outreach will have an impact on SBS awareness and prevention in our region and beyond.