The “world wide web” has given us immense power to share information and communicate.  We have only just begun to realize its full capacity.   Most organizations have been using the web to create their own individual website.  Their home page is two dimensional.   Many of them have links within their home page (and other pages) whereby the viewer can dig deeper into the organization’s website, thus moving into the 3rd dimension.   Very few organizations link to outside organizations – mostly because they don’t want people to “leave” their site.   So this has kept the use of the web to 3 dimensions.   e-Commons encourages 4th dimensional sharing and exploration by allowing multiple individuals and organizations to co-own the site, link to their own site, and send traffic back and forth.   In addition, it creates virtual work rooms in which people with similar interests or a mission to accomplish can establish a virtual place to communicate and/or get work done.

Anyone who registers to the e-Commons has the opportunity to be a co-owner and co-creator, to link information, join a work room or start their own.

The name “Commons” comes from the historical notion that there are some things that are universally owned – like the air we breathe.   In England, the “commons” was the shared square of land that was surrounded by homes.   It was the place where people gathered, shared information, and created community.   These are the themes that underpin our “e-Commons”.

The era of the internet has given us the opportunity to reach the nursing (and other communities) in a way unimaginable a decade ago.   Never before have we had such immense power to inform people on such a wide-scale basis and provide virtually instantaneous answers and resources.  We have taken advantage of the world-wide web by creating a new co-owned and co-created center on environmental health nursing.

This site is content rich with information and links to credible sources from non-profit organizations, the government, and academia.  It is also employing some of the powerful social networking tools that up until now have largely been used for recreational/social communication and retooling them as professional tools for shared knowledge and broad dissemination of educational materials (including the use of multi-media “guest lectures” and recordings from national meetings).    “e-Commons” also allows nurses to set up virtual workrooms in which to create new resources, such as a planned virtual textbook on environmental health expressly geared towards a nursing audience.

Nurses make thousands of home visits a week in the US and yet there is no protocol or tool for them to do a quick assessment of the home-based environmental health risks that may be posed to the vulnerable individual and their family.  On the website we are creating simple, interactive check list for home health and visiting nurses about common potential health threats in the home – lead, radon, smoking, pesticide use, carbon monoxide, mold, and also certain cleaning, arts/crafts, and personal care products, etc.  We are working collaboratively with the National Center for Healthy Homes which has developed a several day, in-person training on home assessments and translating this training into a distant-learning format. We will need to market this tool so that nurses learn of its existence. We will create a similar tool for school nurses so that they can learn about and act on the environmental health risks in their schools – indoor air quality threats, pesticide use, and so on.  We will be writing articles for the popular nursing press to direct nurses to these new resources, presenting at national nursing conferences and working within nursing subspecialty organizations.

The Education Work Group of the Alliance has a variety of projects planned.  For nursing faculty, “e-Commons” will provide virtual classrooms, with “guest lecture” videos by world class environmental health specialists within and outside the nursing profession that faculty can have their students watch.  (These will be available to all nurses, not just faculty.)   Along with lectures, there will be recommendations for student readings, class assignments, and other pedagogical tools.   Nursing curriculum is divided into a standard set of components including physical assessment, maternal and child health, medical/surgical care, psych/mental health, and others.  For each of these curricular components, lectures, reading materials, assignments, and compelling real world case studies will be made available for faculty to adopt/adapt for their courses.

For nurses working in institutional settings (hospitals, nursing homes, clinics) a virtual “Green Team” will be created to provide information and practical tools on how to set up a green team in their facilities and how to address the range of issues that Health Care Without Harm and Hospitals for a Healthy Environment have been addressing: mercury and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) elimination, environmentally-preferable purchasing, green buildings, green cleaning, methods to address pests without using pesticides, serving sustainable foods, and addressing facilities’ overall carbon footprint.  For this content area many, if not most, of the materials exist but they are not organized in a way that nurses can readily access and use them.  And they have not been broadly marketed to the nursing community nationally.

For all nurses there will be information about drinking water quality, air pollution, green buildings and sustainable development (smart growth), sustainable agriculture, and global warming, as well as emergent issues like “toxic toys” so that they can be informed and engaged citizens in their own communities. All content on “e-Commons” will be geared towards informing nurses and calling them to action, whether within their immediate spheres of institutional influence, in their communities, or in state or national policy arenas.   We will link to The Luminary Project, a website sponsored by Health Care Without Harm, that houses the stories of nurses around the world who have been making positive changes in environmental health.  Using social networking/mapping techniques we will be able to connect nurses who enter “e-Commons” to local and national activists on their issues of interest.

We have developed the basic architecture for “e-Commons” at the beginning of 2009 and welcome you to join us in our endeavor to co-create a tool for the nursing profession that will help to integrate environmental health into nursing education, practice, research, and policy/advocacy.