Flipping the classroom to teach population health: Increasing the relevance

• We compare educational approaches to population health content for nursing students.
• We evaluated student outcomes of two different educational approaches.
• Flipped classroom designs are effective for delivery of population health content.
• The ability to apply population health concepts is essential to nursing practice.

In recent years, there have been multiple calls to enhance the population health and health promotion aspects of nursing programs. Further impetus has been provided by passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 with its focus on prevention. The need to develop students who can critically think and apply knowledge learned is crucial to the development of nurses who can integrate and apply the concepts of population-focused practice in society and a healthcare system undergoing transformation. This coupled with the ever changing needs of learners requires a different approach to content delivery and presentation. Flipped classroom courses, with an online component, offer the flexibility and technology desired by current undergraduate students. The use of a flipped classroom approach to re-design a population health course in a Midwestern nursing program resulted in stronger course evaluations from students and reflected better student understanding of the relevance of such content in a nursing curriculum.