Swedish Nursing Professor Spending Semester Teaching on Fayetteville Campus

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Jan Mårtensson, left, is teaching in the Eleanor Mann School of Nursing at the University of Arkansas this semester as the result of an exchange agreement with Jönköping University in Sweden that the schools director, Nan Smith-Blair, right, helped to establish.

For Jan Mårtensson, teaching this semester at the University of Arkansas was an opportunity he could not say no to, even though it required that he leave his home in Sweden to do it.

Mårtensson, an associate professor of nursing science at Jönköping University in Jönköping, Sweden, is teaching an undergraduate honors and graduate course about heart failure this spring in the Eleanor Mann School of Nursing in the College of Education and Health Professions. He conducts research in cardiovascular nursing with emphasis on secondary prevention in patients with chronic heart failure.

Nan Smith-Blair, director of the Eleanor Mann School of Nursing, noted: "One goal that Dr. Mårtensson and I have is to establish international research interests in the area of congestive heart failure. Amy Parette, an honors student, will be working with him on her research project to examine differences in care of congestive heart failure patients. We are committed to developing this international program to allow our students and faculty a more global view of nursing and health care."

Officials with the University of Arkansas signed an agreement in the fall of 2008 with officials of the School of Health Sciences at Jönköping University to facilitate the exchange of students and faculty between the two institutions of higher learning. For the past three summers, an interdisciplinary team of Arkansas faculty members has taken a team of students to learn about health care in Sweden, which has a socialized health-care system.

A nursing lecturer from Jönköping visited the Fayetteville campus briefly last year, and Mårtensson's visit will be the first semester-long exchange. Eventually, officials say, students from Sweden will study here and students from Arkansas will study in Sweden for one semester at a time.

Arkansas faculty dubbed the program in which the students travel to Sweden in the summer Health Teams Abroad, and students majoring in nursing, pre-medical, kinesiology and communication disorders have participated so far. In the program, faculty members emphasize the necessity for teamwork among various health professionals for the best outcome of the patient or client. The program won a campus award in 2007 for its collaborative nature, and students and faculty were featured in a short video shown at the annual fall Academic Convocation for freshmen. 

Mårtensson has come to the United States several times on a professional basis, including a ‎five-week stay 10 years ago when he collaborated with colleagues at the University of California at Los Angeles while working on his doctoral thesis. He and his wife have three children, including one who is an au pair in the United States, and they plan to visit him while he's staying in Fayetteville. The family will also keep in touch using Skype, a software application that allows users to make free video and voice calls over the Internet.

Mårtensson has taught at Jönköping since 2002, the year he completed his doctorate. He also has 15 years of experience as a cardiac nurse. In addition to teaching, Mårtensson will assist in supervision and guidance of some nursing students in the College of Education and Health Professions' Honors Program.

"I also want to explore the cardiovascular health facilities in the area," he said. "I will study the differences between the health-care systems and follow-up practices of Sweden and the United States. When I was asked by the faculty here if I was interested in coming to Arkansas, I couldn't say no to the opportunity."

"In my country, everyone has an equal right to health care," he continued. "We all pay a certain amount of taxes for it, depending on our income. The health-care centers involved in preventive care work together with the hospitals. Cooperation between the two levels of health care differs also among European countries. The private sector for health care is very small in Sweden. I think, in some ways, we are more focused on preventing health problems than you are in the United States, but we as health care staff always think we should have more focus on prevention."

This emphasis on prevention carries over into schools and the workplace, Mårtensson said. Many employers conduct annual wellness checks for their employees, he said.

Faculty of the Eleanor Mann school have many professional relationships with local health providers, in part because the school's students work in many settings to gain clinical experience as part of their coursework. Mårtensson said he has been invited to visit several local health facilities.

The American-Scandinavian Foundation in New York, a cultural and educational nonprofit organization, provided half of the funding for his visit with the other half provided by the University of Arkansas, Mårtensson said. While here, he will speak at the foundation headquarters as well as make presentations at some conferences in the United States.

"This helps me to meet other researchers in my field," Mårtensson said. "I also hope that we ‎will have joint research projects in the near future involving students and faculty members from ‎both Jönköping University and the University of Arkansas."