Department of Nursing and Allied Health, School of Health Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia.
Front Public Health. 2023 Jan 30;11:1082325. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1082325. eCollection 2023.
Maintaining progress in the face of looming burnout during the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic was crucial for the health workforce, including those educating the next generation of health professionals. The experiences of students and healthcare practitioners have been explored to a greater degree than the experiences of university-based health professional educators.
This qualitative study examined the experiences of nursing and allied health academics at an Australian University during COVID-19 disruptions in 2020 and 2021 and describes the strategies that academics and/or teams implemented to ensure course continuity. Academic staff from nursing, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, and dietetics courses at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia provided narratives regarding the key challenges and opportunities they faced.
The narratives highlighted the strategies generated and tested by participants amidst rapidly changing health orders and five common themes were identified: disruption; stress; stepping up, strategy and unexpected positives, lessons, and legacy impacts. Participants noted challenges related to student engagement in online learning and ensuring the acquisition of discipline-specific practical skills during periods of lock-down. Staff across all disciplines reported increased workload associated with converting teaching to on-line delivery, sourcing alternative fieldwork arrangements, and dealing with high levels of student distress. Many reflected on their own expertise in using digital tools in teaching and their beliefs about the effectiveness of distance teaching for health professional training. Ensuring students were able to complete required fieldwork hours was particularly challenging due to constantly changing public health orders and conditions and staffing shortages at health services. This was in addition to illness and isolation requirements further impacting the availability of teaching associates for specialist skills classes.
Solutions such as remote and blended learning telehealth, and simulated placements were rapidly implemented in some courses especially where fieldwork could not be rescheduled or amended at the health settings. The implications and recommendations for educating and ensuring competence development in the health workforce during times when usual teaching methods are disrupted are discussed.
在 COVID-19 大流行的头两年，面对日益逼近的职业倦怠，保持进展对卫生工作者至关重要，包括那些教育下一代卫生专业人员的人。与在卫生保健机构工作的卫生保健从业者相比，学生的经历已被更深入地探讨过，而大学卫生专业教育者的经历却相对较少。
本定性研究调查了澳大利亚一所大学的护理和联合健康专业学者在 2020 年和 2021 年 COVID-19 中断期间的经历，并描述了学者和/或团队为确保课程连续性而实施的策略。澳大利亚斯威本科技大学护理、职业治疗、物理治疗和营养学课程的学术人员提供了有关他们所面临的主要挑战和机遇的叙述。
这些叙述突出了参与者在快速变化的卫生命令中生成和测试的策略，并确定了五个共同主题：中断；压力；挺身而出，策略和意外的积极因素，经验教训和遗留影响。参与者注意到与学生在线学习参与度相关的挑战以及在封锁期间确保获得特定学科实践技能的挑战。所有学科的员工都报告说，与将教学转换为在线交付、寻找替代实地工作安排以及处理高水平学生困扰相关的工作量增加。许多人反思了自己在教学中使用数字工具的专业知识，以及他们对远程教学对卫生专业培训有效性的信念。由于公共卫生命令和条件不断变化以及卫生服务部门人员短缺，确保学生能够完成所需的实地工作时间特别具有挑战性。此外，疾病和隔离要求进一步影响了专门技能课程教学助理的可用性。
一些课程迅速实施了远程和混合学习远程医疗和模拟实习等解决方案，特别是在无法重新安排或修改卫生机构实地工作的情况下。讨论了在通常的教学方法受到干扰时教育和确保卫生工作者能力发展的意义和建议。
