S.P. Ngai1, A.C. Woo1, S.S. Ng1
1The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Background: Clinical Education is one of the most important components in physiotherapy education. Under the pandemic of COVID-19, clinical placements for final year students have been put on hold on or even called off. With the continual escalating number of cases, it is unforeseeable when the face to face hands-on clinical practice or patient direct contact care could be resumed which delays students’ study progression and even graduation with unknown date. The delayed graduation not only imposes huge impact to students, but also leads to insufficient supply of healthcare graduate to the hospitals/ community to meet with increased patient load and healthcare needs in hospitals and community. In view of this, our team has taken the lead to adopt the “Blended” mode of clinical education by using “online” synchronous non-patient contact simulated real case management (thereafter termed as “online mode” ) to substitute the suddenly “called off” face to face patient contact clinical placement.
Purpose: This study aims to examine and compare the learning experience using the 2 different modes in this block of clinical placement adopted during the pandemic and to explore and understand students’ perspective in adopting the new “mode” of blended clinical education.
Methods: All final year students (n=109) completed the blended clinical education. They were invited to complete a preset survey with questions directed to their learning experience involved in different parts of the learning process in the blended clinical education using a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree). Differences in learning experience obtained in face to face patient contact and the “online mode” were compared by Wilcoxon signed rank test with α set at 0.05.
Results: In total, 62% (n=67) of the students completed the survey. When comparing the learning experience, students reported improvement in knowledge gained, clinical reasoning, problem solving ability and management planning with no between group differences (p>0.05). No difference in the level of stress to interact with clinical educators in face to face mode and online mode was found (p=0.26). While for qualitative feedback, majority of students commented that “online mode” facilitated in-depth discussion and training on clinical reasoning despite through “simulated” tasks.
Conclusion(s): The current data suggested that the use of “blended clinical placement” is feasible to support students’ clinical training and preparing them to meet with the essential clinical competency under the pandemic.
Implications: The findings suggested that “blended” mode would be feasible to support or complement with the traditional mode of clinical placement to facilitate students’ learning experience.
Funding, acknowledgements: No funding support.
Keywords: Clinical education, pandemic
Topic: Education: clinical
Did this work require ethics approval? Yes
Institution: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Committee: Human Subjects Ethics Sub-committee
Ethics number: HSEARS20200806002
All authors, affiliations and abstracts have been published as submitted.
