Telehealth Use in Interdisciplinary Health Professions Student Groups to Support Improved Outcomes

Introduction

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has created significant waves of disruption within university educational delivery, including undergraduate and graduate level health professions programs since it began, with issues occurring on many levels (Diaz, et al., 2021; Hoofman, et al., 2019). In graduate level health professions programs, meeting programmatic requirements (such as testing and monitoring of student symptom status) during the initial early days of the outbreak was followed by the issue of assuring current COVID-19 initial ‘jab’ and booster vaccination status (Drenkard, et al., 2022). Among the most problematic of issues was that many graduate level health professions students were left wanting in terms of clinical placements due to scarcity of preceptors and organizational hesitancy to take on students during the pandemic.

All graduate level health professions programs require that a student spend a specified number of hours in the clinical setting, where they learn from experiences in working alongside licensed health care providers in their field of practice or specialty. While the number and type of clinical hours required for graduation varies by program specialty, in the United States each graduate level health professions student must meet their program specifications in terms of number of clinical hours (as well as any other programmatic requirements) in order to successfully complete their health professions program. In the United States, students must show proof of successful program completion through official academic program transcripts in order to qualify to take the national professional board examination for their specialty, which they must then pass in order to begin the process of becoming licensed in their home state of residence.

Securing clinical placements for graduate level health professions students has become increasingly competitive over time. The paucity of preceptors and clinical sites is due to multiple factors such as the expanding volume of graduate level health professions programs, increasing numbers of students desiring to enter the health professions, retirement of many providers from the Baby Boomer’ generation, and reduced willingness of seasoned providers to precept students. Many preceptors today are also requiring students pay the preceptor for each preceptorship they engage in.

While most graduate level health professions programs place the primary burden to locate preceptors and clinical placement locales on their students, if the students are unable to secure a preceptor and site then the responsibility falls on program faculty to support students in their search. The lack of available clinical placements and the requirement that faculty step up and support students in securing clinical sites and preceptors when students fail to do so has added significantly to the already full workload of faculty in graduate level health professions programs. On top of the issues that had naturally resulted in increasing competitiveness for preceptors and clinical sites (e.g., retiring preceptors, increasing numbers of graduate level health professions programs and therefore students) is the fact that the pandemic caused many health care organizations and hospital systems to place moratoriums or severe limits on student access to their facilities for the purpose of academic clinical site placement.

In response to the clinical placement constraints imposed by the pandemic, creative solutions were sought which could potentially help to fill the gap and support students to successfully complete both didactic (Hao, et al., 2021) and clinical course hour programmatic requirements (Triemstra, et al., 2021). The issue of how to deal with loss of the standard classroom and clinical environments impacted students from university educational programs across many health professions domains, including dental programs, nursing programs (Huang, 2021), pharmacy programs (Etando, et al., 2021), physical therapy programs (Ng, et al., 2021), as well as physician and other medical school based specialty programs (Martinelli, et al., 2021; Song, et al., 2021); Su et al., 2021; Al-Balas, et al., 2020). This problem of being able to secure clinical site placements and preceptors for the purposes of fulfilling academic health professions program requirements has not been limited to the United States. The peer-reviewed literature contains papers describing the issues encountered in securing clinical placements due to the COVID-19 pandemic by health professions students and faculty in many nations across the globe, including Africa (Etando, et al., 2021), China (Su, et al. 2021), Europe, (Hempel, et al., 2021), Jordan (Al-Balas, et al., 2020), among others.