Effects of Telehealth Education and Simulation on Graduate Students

Background: Concerns exist regarding the preparedness of health care providers’ ability to provide adequate care via telehealth compared to in-person visits. Since the COVID-19 pandemic shifted, patient and provider expectations have changed for accessing and delivering care via telehealth (Thielman, 2020). A knowledge gap exists in preparing providers for telehealth practice due to various factors, the most obvious being the lack of telehealth education in nursing (Rutledge et al., 2017). The increased use of telehealth and technologies has transformed telehealth from a basic to essential competency for all graduating APRN’s (Dzioba et al., 2022). Purpose: The purpose of the quality improvement project was to determine if implementing telehealth education via didactic and simulation increases graduate nursing students’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Method: This quality improvement project used the simulation and didactic methods of a multimodal approach to provide telehealth training to advanced practice nurse practitioner students (N=11). Using van Houwelingen et al. (2016), telehealth knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs), identified 52 KSA competencies categorized under 14 nursing telehealth-entrustable professional activities (NT-EPAs) critical for an educational foundation in telehealth. Results: KSA scores significantly increased post-education and simulation content. A paired t-test between pre and post-test demonstrated significance in knowledge (p= \u3c.001), skills (p= \u3c.001), and attitude (p=\u3c.05). A Wilcoxon signed-rank test further verified significance between pre and post-test scores knowledge (p= \u3c.001), Skills (p= \u3c.05) and attitude (p=\u3c.05). Conclusion: Results of this quality improvement project demonstrates additional evidence that utilizing the multimodal framework to provide telehealth education increases graduate students’ KSAs