Abstract
COVID-19 left a damaged path since its arrival in December 2019. Clinical Coordination in a Physician Assistant (PA) program is an important aspect of PA education. It is important to examine the effects, good or bad, that COVID-19 and other factors have played in the clinical rotation scheduling and placement of PA students in their clinical rotation experiences. To evaluate those effects, it was determined to look at the encounter numbers from the past seven years in the Evalue online system of students in the Southern Illinois University (SIU) PA program as well as survey results obtained from other institutions that programs made for comparison. According to the number of encounters, there appeared to be an increasing trend in the SIU PA program until COVID-19 came along, which displaced students from their clinical rotations for several months. In addition, there were several adjustments and new implementations made by multiple institutions including SIU, Saint Louis University (SLU), and George Fox University (GFU) that were necessary for the successful completion of the program by its students. It appears that COVID-19 did play an important role in the decline of patient encounters for PA students, however, there could be other factors contributing to this decline as well that have not been evaluated.
Recommended Citation
Barke, Halley
(2023)
"The Effects of COVID-19 on Clinical Coordination and the Education of Physician Assistant Students,"
SIU Journal of Medical Science Scholarly Works: Vol. 1:
Iss.
1, Article 2.
Available at:
https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/jmssw/vol1/iss1/2