Appendix B

Unanswered Questions for Further Exploration¹

Jasmine L. Garland McKinney, University of North Carolina Greensboro, and liaison to the student consultants, asked:

• How can health professions include and honor student voices and the intersection of identities; for example, how can previous leadership or life experiences outside of the academic setting be acknowledged?
• Prior to this, how can health professions leaders effectively explain the why behind decision-making processes to their learners?

Mark Merrick, Commission on Accreditation of Athletic Training Education, posed three questions to the panelists:

• How do we identify and remediate the gaps in competencies that were created by pulling students out of clinical experiences during the pandemic?
• Does this crisis create a case for competency-based education that gives more flexibility in determining learner competence, rather than the more structured and rigid current models?
• What role did pulling students from clinicals play in exacerbating disparity in outcomes of the pandemic? Doing so reduced our student’s exposure to patients, and it potentially meant fewer “boots on the ground” in the communities that were hit the hardest.

Reena Karani, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Kenya Beard, Chamberlain University; and Casey Shillam, University of Portland School of Nursing, each asked one question, respectively:

• What are organizations and health professions education schools doing now to address the gaps in hands-on practical clinical skills that were compromised in students as a result of being pulled from the clinical learning environment?
• When disciplines fail to collaborate, the ripple effect outside of our discipline creates damaging silos. When the pandemic fades, what can we do collaboratively to be better prepared for the next crisis, and how do you envision this collaborative?
• There is an emerging mental health crisis in the health professions, with new entrants and students burdened and lacking personal connections and support systems. How can we support their transition into the workforce and ensure their success?

Pam Jeffries, Vanderbilt School of Nursing, laid the foundation for her questions by saying, “Having lived through COVID and lockdowns, educators had to be flexible and creative in providing instructional continuity.” She then asked:

• With the transition of our health professional students to practice, what changes are occurring in health care organizations to accommodate this diversified, virtual, and atypical learning and clinical education?
• What role did technologies play, and what role will the use of technologies continue in a world post-COVID-19? What did we learn and want to continue forward? What do we need to do better (i.e., refine and develop competencies around) to provide quality, relevant health professions education?