Visualizing diversity: the Oregon Health & Science University Educational Use Photo Diversity Repository

Background: Health science education needs images that represent both the diversity of patients served and the diversity of its students and clinicians. To begin to address this need, a nurse educator and librarian collaborated to launch the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Educational Use Photo Diversity Repository. This online resource provides educators of health professional students with access to photos of pathophysiological conditions in skin of various colors so their students can increase their awareness of issues related to health and diversity and prepare themselves for more effective clinical work with their future patients.Case Presentation: The OHSU Educational Use Photo Diversity Repository became a university-wide project, leveraging the thoughts of an image advisory board, clinicians, faculty members, administrators, and students. Key considerations were given to the workflows used to submit photos as well as the controlled vocabulary for submitting images. The repository was started with photos already in existence, with future plans to have images taken specifically for the repository.Conclusions: This repository is playing an important role as OHSU and the health sciences in general reflect on the role of systemic racism in health care and clinical education. Negotiating issues of consent, patient health information, and privacy around using different technologies to take photos is a complex and ongoing process. The repository provides opportunities for closely examining these processes and creating improvements that result in more equitable education.

Online-synchronized clinical simulation: an efficient teaching-learning option for the COVID-19 pandemic time and: beyond

Face-to-face clinical simulation has been a powerful methodology for teaching, learning, and research, and has positioned itself in health science education. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing has forced universities to abandon simulation centers and make use of alternatives that allow the continuation of educational programs safely for students and teachers through virtual environments such as distance simulation. In Latin America, before the pandemic, the use of non-presential simulation was very limited and anecdotal. This article has three main objectives: to establish the efficacy of online-synchronized clinical simulation in the learning and performance of medical students on the management of patients with COVID-19 in simulation centers of three Latin American countries, to determine the quality of the online debriefing from the students’ perspective, and to deepen the understanding of how learning is generated with this methodology.

Online Teaching in Ayurveda Medical Education during COVID 19 Pandemic – A Descriptive Survey Study

The impact of COVID 19 has disrupted all domains of human existence and educational institutions around the world. The national lockdown caused major interruption in students learning, both theory and practice; disruptions in internal assessments and the postponement of qualifying university examinations in health science education institutions. In order to assess the magnitude and the severity of the impact of the catastrophe on the health science education sector in the state, the Kerala University of Health Sciences (KUHS), Thrissur, Kerala conducted online surveys among the stake holders during April-May 2020. Objectives: To assess the perceptions of Ayurveda faculty members on online teaching during COVID 19 pandemic on the health science education institutions in Kerala. Materials and Methods: This descriptive online survey study was targeted the Faculty members from 17 Ayurveda colleges affiliated to Kerala University of Health Sciences. A total of 314 valid responses were collected regarding Ayurveda faculty members perceptions of online teaching during COVID 19 pandemic prevention and control strategy in Kerala using semi structured questionnaire in Google form. The responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results: The results of the survey of 314 Ayurveda faculty members indicate that the majority of these teachers support online teaching strategies in order to bridge the learning gap and epidemic prevention and control initiative. Conclusions: Facing an unprecedented situation, the problems and challenges encountered by Ayurveda faculty in switching to and providing online learning will serve as a reference for other countries as they explore and implement online teaching programs.

Assessment programs and their components: a network approach

Exams and other assessments in health science education are not random events; rather, they are part of a bigger assessment program that is constructively aligned with the intended learning outcomes at different stages of a health science curriculum. Depending on topical and temporal distance, assessments in the program are correlated with each other to a more or lesser extent. Although correlation does not equate causation, once we come to understand the correlational structure of an assessment program, we can use that information to make predictions of future performance, to consider early intervention for students who are otherwise likely to drop out, and to inform revisions in either assessment or teaching. This article demonstrates how the correlational structure of an assessment program can be represented in terms of a network, in which the assessments constitute our nodes and the degree of connectedness between any two nodes can be represented as a thicker or thinner line connecting these two nodes, depending on whether the correlation between the two assessments at hand is stronger or weaker. Implications for educational practice and further research are discussed.