Health Care Students Gain Training Virtually

When a pandemic gets in the way of hands-on clinical training, what are health care students to do?

Patricia Hoyson, Ph.D., director of the family nurse practitioner program at Youngstown State University Department of Nursing, told a reporter for the Jambar that graduate-level nursing students have found it difficult to meet all the hours of clinical training required, due to COVID-19 safety precautions that have limited their access to health care facilities.

But the students are finding a way, through the Wasson Center for Clinical Skills Training, Assessment, and Scholarship at Northeast Ohio Medical University. They work with Standardized Patients – real people trained with scripts to act as patients, as they have in the past. The difference is that now, according to the article, these students get the training not in person but via telemedicine sessions facilitated by the Wasson Center.

Via a video call, students meet with Standardized Patients trained by the Wasson Center and go through an exercise designed by the Center to interview, assess and diagnose them.

Read the full story in the Jambar.