NECO Faculty Respond with Creative Approach to Clinical Training

NECO Faculty Respond with Creative Approach to Clinical Training

156 hours of rigorous cases that hone critical thinking developed

Olivia Bass (pictured), a fourth-year student at NECO, was just three weeks into her final rotation when the coronavirus pandemic forced training sites to suspend clinical training programs. Bass, who was at a remote Indian Health Service hospital in Alaska, was suddenly faced with a disruption to her final training a few months shy of completing her degree.

Yet within two weeks of clinic closures, NECO launched its own program to temporarily replace in-person clinical training for students in their second, third and fourth years. The program uses virtual case review and analysis, allowing students like Bass to log clinic hours remotely while still gaining valuable clinical experience.

The fast response was due to Diane Russo, OD, MPH, and Jonathon Jimmerson, OD, who anticipated the need and swiftly designed the program they dubbed ELASTC: E-Learning Alternatives and Supplements for Time away from Clinic. As the instructors of record for the clinical education for second through fourth year students, Drs. Russo and Jimmerson engaged faculty members who jumped in to create the case studies that are the basis of the program.  

“ELASTC is based on the type of patients that students would typically encounter in the clinic and the kind of evidence-based analysis they would discuss with their attending doctors,” explained Kristen Brown, OD, associate dean of clinical affairs.

By mid-May, more than 156 hours of program content was developed by 38 faculty members and five residents. Dr. Brown explained, “We made sure we had a very robust program — one that was based on the existing clinical curriculum and one that could be standardized, quantified and tracked over the course of the term. At the time, nobody knew what was going to be an acceptable alternative to clinic hours, so we wanted to exceed expectations. We set a very high bar.”

“There truly is no replacement for in-person patient care and learning in the field,” Dr. Brown noted, “but this is an excellent alternative.” And while ELASTC was designed with the current crisis in mind, its future potential for supplemental case analysis and tutoring was quickly realized. 

In the ELASTC program, students independently and asynchronously access the faculty-recorded case studies, which they view after reading supplemental materials such as case-related journal articles. To progress through each case, students must successfully answer a set of questions regarding differential diagnoses, treatment plans and the like. The questions are structured in a way that closely mirrors the discussion points that students would normally encounter in the clinical setting.

Newly official Dr. Bass reflects on the ELASTC program that gave her a means to hone clinical skills while staying on schedule for degree completion in May. “I appreciate the variety of cases and the faculty working hard, under these circumstances, to help us continue to build critical thinking skills that would be gained from being in clinic,” Dr. Bass said. “It was a proud moment to see how the faculty came together and responded as a team.”

Dr. Bass also appreciates hearing from the clinical faculty about their experiences providing patient care via telehealth, since she knows that telemedicine is likely to become a formal component of health care, at least to some extent.

Since NECO’s clinical faculty launched telehealth services quickly in response to the risk of COVID-19, they were able to incorporate this new mode of access to care and case analysis into the ELASTC program.