When she realized an idea for a module to supplement third-year medical students’ clerkships had enough information to become a full online course, Dr. Caroline Abercrombie, senior director of experiential learning for Quillen College of Medicine, decided to collaborate with faculty from other ETSU programs to create an interprofessional graduate elective course related to COVID-19.
The two-week, online course – COVID-19 Preparedness, Prevention and Management for an Interprofessional Team – was developed by faculty from the Quillen College of Medicine, Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy and the College of Public Health. Originally created for medical students, the course is now offered to both medical and pharmacy students. The first session began in late April.
“This is something they need in their tool belt before they get out in the clinical environment,” Abercrombie said. “And that’s what excites me because this information overload, and knowing how to sort through it and knowing how to keep you and your patients safe and calm and healthy. I think there’s just so many tools that we’re offering through this course that excites me because I thought my students were prepared, and then this happened.”
The asynchronous course includes a mix of content specific information about COVID-19, including its molecular structure, the pathophysiology of the disease and how humans respond to it, as well as general foundational concepts that the students can apply in any situation that requires an interprofessional team. It also includes a mini-session on Federal Emergency Management Agency response that provides a certificate in emergency preparedness – an element incorporated by College of Public Health Associate Professor Dr. Megan Quinn.
“It’s on just kind of how you communicate and the logistics through an emergency,” Quinn said. “So that could be a pandemic, that could be Hurricane Katrina, that could be the tornadoes that just happened outside of Cookeville, and so kind of the language that you use, who’s in charge and how the organizations work together when you have multiple organizations working on the same thing.”
The students’ final project involves creating a team of at least five members, in which they pick a setting, identify each team member’s roles and responsibilities and try to communicate efficiently to create a response.
“For my personal project – you know, I want to practice family medicine in this area,” rising fourth-year medical student Jared Rhinehardt said. “And so, I have kind of geared mine towards a primary care clinic and associated staff in East Tennessee, and so it really has been interesting because there’s a lot of stuff that, yeah, I know it if you really asked me, but I hadn’t sat down and thought about how all of the interprofessional folks would work together and what would need to be accomplished by whom, so that’s been impactful, I think, and useful.”
College of Medicine Professor Dr. David Wood said as they continue to teach the course, the course will change as new information about the virus surfaces each day.
“It will definitely change,” Wood said. “There’s hundreds of articles coming out every day on COVID[-19] and we’re learning a lot about it. It has so many different applications for the all the different students in their practice, in their future practice. Unfortunately, this epidemic’s not going to go away very soon, and then we will have future epidemics. Unfortunately, this is a kind of a product of the way we live now, where we’re interacting with animals in different sorts of ways.”
College of Pharmacy Associate Professor Dr. Emily Flores said because information about the virus is continually changing, an important part of the course is providing students with access to reliable information. Students have access to regularly updated sources including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine and the World Health Organization.
For rising fourth-year medical student David Taylor, learning how to understand and synthesize information from different sources to realize what is accurate and what is not will help prepare him for his future role of taking care of patients
“Something that’s been kind of a term I’ve seen thrown around is an ‘infodemic’ is going on right now, too,” Taylor said. “And so as future physicians, we’re not – I mean, we’re not in clinic right now – but something we can be doing is sharing information that’s relevant, and true and accurate, and just knowing kind of what goes into this and why. You know, why did people compare it to the flu, and why is that not accurate, and those kind of things.”
Taylor said the biggest thing he has taken away from the course is the interprofessional aspect – learning how different sectors of the healthcare industry respond to a crisis.
“One of the big things I’m taking away, is how do we respond to this as a healthcare team, not as just physicians,” Taylor said. “So, you know, what role does pharmacy play, what role does public health, what role does nursing, what role does basic science research play in this? All of those things kind of come together to really make this giant response, and it’s been good to look at how each of those can play a role in this.”
Two course sessions have taken place so far, with a third session set to take place in June. The first session only had medical students, but pharmacy students were added into the second session, completing it as a component of their Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experiences. While no public health students have taken it yet because the course is currently in an approval process for main campus graduate students, Quinn said they are hopeful for the possibility in the future.
Rising third-year medical students are scheduled to enroll in the two-week June course. Flores said the College of Pharmacy approved a public health APPE this week for a month-long version of the course in June, in which the additional part of the month will explore other public health concerns from a pharmacist’s perspective.
As the course evolves, Abercrombie said it would be exciting to involve more programs, and Wood said it would be great to get the College of Business and the social sciences involved. Diseases not only impact the healthcare community but society as a whole, he said, and this is something he hopes medical students can learn from this course to keep them grounded.
“I think one of the great lessons of COVID[-19] is how health and health care impacts other aspects of society, and the students are doing reflections on who are the first responders here,” Wood said. “It’s not doctors and nurses and pharmacists or public health people. It’s our grocery clerks. It’s the people that pick up our garbage, and I think it really – well, first of all, I think this disease is humbling all of us, I hope, how fragile our ecosystem is, but it also, I think, is teaching the students that what they’re doing is really connected to a web – a social web – and we’re all dependent on each other.”
