Abstract:

Introduction:
Simulation is a well-known methodology used to teach and learn in healthcare sciences. It is used to develop awareness regarding patient pathologies or health conditions in undergraduate and graduate programmes e.g: Alzheimer's, mental health, or disability. Due to Covid19, there has been an exponential growth of virtual teaching and virtual interactions in education and an increment in the provision of healthcare at distance. Health professionals have adapted their way of interacting with patients online by trial and error. For future health professionals as “virtualists”, there is a need to identify competencies required for online interactions and to develop focused courses to address these.
This project was developed within The European Network of Physiotherapy in Higher Education (ENPHE), a platform enabling innovative co-creation and active collaboration among stakeholders. ENPHE's goal is to develop a competency framework and create appropriate education. Using simulation as a methodology an exploratory activity was designed. The purpose was twofold, to gather student’s and teacher’s experiences of online interactions with patients in real-time, as well as to investigate the feasibility and usefulness of the activity.

Methods:
A simulation case, previously designed and implemented by ENPHE members for a clinical reasoning course, was adapted considering competencies described by Sharma et al (2019). This consisted of adapting the script to a scenario customized to performing an online interview with a patient in real-time. A guide for teachers, simulation instructors, and the simulated patient was developed to define the scenario. The guide also included questions and topics to facilitate discussion after the simulation scenario. Participation was voluntary.

Results:
The two-hour activity was subsequently piloted three times in March 2021. A total of 7 teachers and 17 students participated. All participants expressed agreement affirming the usefulness of the online simulation and were enthusiastic about the gained experiences. Moreover, participants agreed that the virtual simulation helped them to understand how to properly conduct an online interview with a patient in real-time, that this has to be well planned and requires specific training.

Conclusions:
Our exploratory results show that simulation methodology is useful to explore and create awareness on how to properly use online interviews with patients in real-time. The approach stimulates personal and emotional involvement, as well as reflection. The pedagogical efficacy remains to be evaluated with larger samples and pre-intervention and post-intervention knowledge assessments.

Keywords:

Telehealth, digital health literacy and education, e-learning, online simulation, virtualists.