Healthcare Pandemic Adaptations Continue to Impact Student Career Exploration

COVID-19 greatly impacted healthcare organizations’ ability to offer student job shadow and mentorship opportunities. How did we as healthcare providers adapt and what can we continue to do moving forward to sustain opportunities for career exploration?

Pre-COVID, healthcare systems offered local high school and university students job shadow and mentorship opportunities like one-to-one job shadow with professionals seeing patients in the hospital or clinic, and extended mentorships with specific positions and departments. Or, in the case of my hospital, we offered a variety of hands-on sessions in our simulation lab for students to learn more about healthcare.

When COVID-19 hit all these experiences stopped, and students were no longer able to come into healthcare systems as it put patients and staff at risk. This was a hard decision in healthcare because high school and college students rely on these experiences to gain knowledge of future healthcare careers and save them time and resources if they’re unsure of what their career paths should be.

Luckily, there are creative ways to still offer these experiences to high school and college students. Instead of stopping all job shadowing, mentorship, and hands-on experiences, we can use video recordings, live tours, and demonstrations.

Within my work, we did this in four ways.

1. For high school students, we worked with organizations that helped us promote careers via live or recorded video of professionals discussing their careers, while answering student questions live or questions shared in advance by the student’s organization.
   
   
2. Instead of hands-on simulation sessions, we worked with our local schools to provide live experiences with professionals teaching the students skills such as scrubbing, gowning, and gloving within the classroom. We organized this by providing the typical supplies used within these sessions to the teachers or professors, while live streaming providers, nurses, and other healthcare professionals within their typical work environment.
   
   
3. We also provided more tours of departments throughout our organization to give an insider look of where healthcare professionals work within hospitals and clinics.
   
   
4. Lastly, we provided universities opportunities to view real-time patient care when able. (Please note – this opportunity did require compliance and approval from the university, students, and organization as well as agreement from the patient(s) to meet HIPAA laws and other regulating standards)

This shift not only allowed high school and college-aged students the opportunity to gain knowledge of future healthcare careers, but it also provided healthcare staff a break from their everyday work, which was particularly stressful at the height of the pandemic.

Now, with COVID-19 cases and the pandemic subsiding, these video recordings, and live tours and demonstrations have not stopped with the return of in-person job shadows, mentorships, and simulation sessions. Instead, they continue to open more opportunities and possibilities for high schools and universities to provide the knowledge needed for their students’ career exploration, and not just within healthcare.

Download the guide to find out how the right audio/video capture solution enhances healthcare training and higher education.