COHP COVID-19 Update: April 30, 2020
April 30, 2020
Faculty and Staff of the College of Health Professions: COVID-19 has consumed most of our attention in March and all of April, yet we are still moving forward. Classes are being taught and the Spring semester is winding down. As evidence of the great work of our faculty, our degrees will be conferred officially at UTHSC on May 11, 2020 and our students will graduate on time!
COVID-19 has made us shift gears rather quickly and along with the rest of the country and world. We had to shut down our interactions, change our teaching, and introduce social distancing. We have had to transform course curriculum that was to be taught in person to courses that would be taught by zoom, on blackboard and fully remotely. We had to change some classes that were to be taught in one semester and move them to another semester. We had to start meeting with students remotely, with video links and training sessions also done off campus.
However, thanks to all of you, our College is still open and still functioning, albeit mostly remotely, at least for the moment. We have adapted to online classes, virtual meetings and wrote manuscripts from data we had already collected, all while staying safe. COVID-19 may have interrupted our flow but it has not stopped us. We have come together to support the College’s mission at a time where adapting, resiliency, and an ability to change the way we have worked historically, are needed more than ever. Congratulations to all of you for your continued work during this difficult time!
I want to thank our faculty and department chairs who have worked very hard to make the teaching transformation. I want to thank our staff for their willingness to move back and forth between home and office and work as much as possible remotely. I also want to acknowledge that our students had to adjust quickly to a different type of learning remotely and yet the requirement for learning and our expectations to assess competence have not changed. We must uphold the full standards of each program as they are needed for passing the board and license examinations for our students. Our standard for quality has not diminished, we are working hard, and we will continue to work hard to maintain that quality.
I am proud of the way in which our college has been on the front lines of the COVID-19 fight. Our graduates from the Diagnostic and Health Sciences Department which include our Master of Cytopathology Practice (MCP) program, our Medical Laboratory of Sciences program (MLS) programs are front line workers who are in hospitals and clinics running the COVID-19 tests. Our Departmental of Diagnostic and Health Science faculty participated in a really wonderful webinar that identified the COVID-19 virus, its action and testing, and also the Health Informatics and Information management program in the same department ran a Telehealth webinar for alumni, students and faculty and practitioners. This is definitely a time to engage the use of telehealth for patient diagnosis and treatment and we are fortunate to have such a strong group of faculty to lead us through these events.
The Occupational Therapy students have been front and center in sewing masks for first responders. The OT students have been leading a 1000 mask project for the institution and this was so very important given the low PPE, low mask and protection that was available for health care workers, yet the OT faculty and students have jumped at the chance to help become part of the solution.
The Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and Speech and Language Pathology students were pulled from their clinical rotations, but the ASP Speech and Hearing clinic will open soon in Knoxville and students will be able to get back to their clinical training and treating patients. Fortunately the ASP clinics have still been open for emergency care for their patients. The Physical Therapy students and Occupational Therapy students are poised and ready to resume clinic work because there will be a significant rehabilitation needed for those who recovered from COVID to get back to normal function, and there are lots of people who had to suspend their rehabilitation treatments as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We think the disruption to life is about to resume slowly – but we also think things will never quite be the same either. There is a plan to open the research laboratories and it will be announced very soon. An oversight committee has been put in place to develop guidelines for bringing students safely to our campuses and engaging them in the clinical training and in laboratories. We expect that students will be back in clinical rotations as early as June. Students are expected back on campus in the fall.
Maybe overdone a bit, but really we are now experiencing the “new normal.” I think that the day of doing the same things in the same ways that we have always done them are completely over. Although may people resist change as it is uncomfortable, we have shown each other that we can change and adapt. Now we must look to the future. Where we are tomorrow will look very much different than it did last year, 5 years ago or a decade or two ago. We need to ask ourselves how will we use this pandemic to adjust our ways of teaching, working, research and interacting? We will do more distance learning. Large lecture halls filled with students will not be the norm. Social distancing, for better or for worse, will become part of our new culture. Gatherings for groups of faculty, students or staff including meeting over lunch, or for discussions will carry too much risk to either those who gather or those who might use the room afterwards so gathering in common areas and conference rooms and libraries cannot occur as it did in the past. We are establishing guidelines for how we will work together after coming back to campus. The COHP is working with the UTHSC campus administration, under the guidance of the local health officials, to ensure a safe phased re-opening of the College. The goal of the guidance is to protect vulnerable students, staff, and faculty and to help ensure a safe and healthy learning environment. Our faculty will need to adapt, patients will think about health care differently and students will be the bridges to make this all work in our new norm. We must learn from this crisis so that we are better able to respond to the next and we will be doing all of this behind a face mask.
Our goals have not changed. We are striving to have every program in the top 20 nationally ranked within 7 years. We are committed to excellence, with or without COVID-19. Our students continue to make strides locally and nationally. Our faculty continue to excel as teachers, mentors and researchers. Our alumni are on the front lines, many with students who are in our programs, doing the clinical work for the people in their communities who need their attention. We have not given up, there is no time to rest, we need to strive even harder. We have set our goals and we are moving forward to meet them. Our college is growing, and we are adding new programs. We have 4 programs that are in the top 50 nationally: Audiology, Speech and Language Pathology, Physical Therapy and Occupational Therapy. Federally funded faculty research has grown exponentially. Never before has this happened in the history of this college and our hard working faculty are to be applauded. We are moving forward.
COVID-19 has impacted how we recruit future graduates, but we are adapting and are committed to the success of our students. If you have not seen the video produced by the COHP Office of Academic Affairs and the COHP Committee of Student Affairs check out how our students and college have responded so well to the pandemic – see: https://youtu.be/rXt49ldiJmY
The campus administration has done a great job in providing guidance concerning COVID-19. For campus updates related to COVID-19, please visit https://uthsc.edu/coronavirus/campus-updates/index.php. More guidelines are to be posted soon to identify the PPE and other policies that we will need to abide by as we transition back to campus.
We have talked about change for two years in our college. This is not the change that we had anticipated, but we are able to change and adapt and we will be stronger as we come together to continue addressing our core missions and follow the Strategic Plan of our College to achieve these goals.
I want to leave you with the web site link for our COVID-19 responses for our college as a point of pride: https://uthsc.edu/health-professions/covid-19/index.php. Thank you to all of those who worked on this video and contributed to it!
Be healthy and be safe!
Stephen E. Alway, PhD
Dean, College of Health Professions