Enhancing Health Care Education and Practice Post COVID
Authors: Cochrane Thomas , Stretton Todd 
Published: January 2022

Healthcare education and practice has significantly been impacted by COVID-19. This includes the challenge on pedagogical approaches that highlight the potential of technology to facilitate innovative new approaches in response to social distancing, lockdowns, remote learning and improving the patient experience and positive outcomes. Many of these innovative approaches are not fundamentally new but are now seeing relevance beyond early adopters to mainstream implementation. This presentation draws upon collaborations with educational researchers and technologists that have explored the integration of technology into healthcare education and practice.

COVID-19 Adversity to Opportunity
Many healthcare programmes required reenvisaging teaching and learning approaches in response to COVID-19 restrictions. This had a particular impact on the development of interpersonal and practical knowledge and skills essential for healthcare graduates.

The limited access to on-campus learning provided an opportunity for both institutional and individual evaluation of pedagogical practices. The affordances of traditional, didactic, and “hands-on” skills were compared with those that could be facilitated using online asynchronous/ synchronous strategies. A particular concern was the development of the interpersonal and practical skills required in safe and effective healthcare practice. Alongside easing of restrictions, these skills were adapted using online demonstrations within the limits of socially distanced “bubbles”, telehealth and limited clinical placements. Reconsideration of summative assessments was also required- with the introduction online synchronous and asynchronous verbal assessments, and asynchronous submissions of practical skills online (Cochrane et al., 2021; Narayan et al., 2021).

In the prospect of COVID-19 restrictions continuing to lift, it is envisioned that most of the reenvisaged pedagogical approaches to healthcare education will persist, without compromising student critical thinking or practical skills.

Interprofessional Collaboration
This presentation will highlight the importance of interprofessional collaboration in healthcare curriculum design using a Design-Based-Research methodology (Chen et al., 2020; Kartoğlu et al., 2020) to facilitate authentic learning and develop self-determined learning capabilities for healthcare professionals.

DBR- Design Principles in response to COVID
Transferable design principles will be introduced for enhancing healthcare education that will improve practice in a COVID19 world, particularly drawing from eight healthcare projects including: STUDIO602 – enhancing clinical practice with mobile technologies (Cochrane & Sinfield, 2021), developing a virtual reality handover experience for healthcare students (Cochrane et al., 2018), using immersive reality to develop critical thinking in clinical health education (Stretton et al., 2018), enhancing first responder clinical simulation education using immersive reality and biometrics (Cochrane et al., 2020), designing authentic learning for graduate entry nursing students (Macdiarmid et al., 2021), designing public and environmental health education (Kersey et al., 2018), Biomedical engineering (Lam et al., 2021), and physiology education (Fabris et al., 2019).
References

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