University of Pennsylvania Nursing Student Receives Award to Provide Health Screenings and Information in Public Libraries

University of Pennsylvania Nursing Student, Melanie Mariano, was awarded $150,000 for the Penn President’s Engagement Prize (PEP) to support an original community engagement project. Mariano’s project was inspired by a required community health nursing course where she worked with fellow students to implement health programs in the Free Library of Philadelphia system.

Their class outreach program was designed mostly for children, but her occasional interactions with adult patients spurred her to expand on the outreach program on her own. While working with a patient who wanted simple counseling on where to get HIV testing from a trusted source and another patient who Mariano talked with in Spanish about his experience immigrating to the US, she began to realize how many individuals fall through the cracks of healthcare and never receive access to the basic health information that many of us take for granted.

Mariano decided to reach out to her course instructors about how the she could work with the School of Nursing to transform the course community engagement project into a more permanent initiative. With guidance from UPenn’s nursing faculty, Mariano drafted a proposal to bring continuity to the nursing school’s involvement in local libraries while adding a person-to-person care element that gives more depth to the healthcare services being offered.

Mariano’s proposal resulted in her winning the PEP award for her project titled Living HEALthy: Health Expansion Across the Libraries. Penn’s PEP award will support Mariano’s project with $100,000 for project expenses and $50,000 for living expenses. After graduation, Mariano will be placing herself in the Free Library’s Central Branch to provide a source of reliable health information, health assessments, and screening tests for the Philadelphia community. She hopes to eventually expand to offer first aid and vaccinations, and expand across the city to bring nurses from neighborhood clinics into more Free Library branches.