At the Ida Institute we are committed to supporting clinicians of the future by always expanding our resources for lecturers, developing new modules for self-guided or blended learning approaches, and materials to support clinical supervisors. We also support student projects across the globe to foster the translation of PCC into action.
Patricia McCarthy, PhD from partner Rush University explains the importance of supporting an interest in person-centered practice from the beginning of students’ training: “While it is perhaps a cliché to say that students represent the future, it is nonetheless important to remember. As such, it is imperative that hearing care students be introduced to the concept of person-centered care early in their careers so it can be a guiding principle in their approach to hearing health care.”
Here’s a roundup of what student projects we’ve been involved in lately.
Video projects illustrating PCC
Aston students and staff Pablo De Los Arcos Diez, Saira Hussain, Christine Mitchell, and Becky Midwinter demonstrated their acting chops under the direction of Helen Pryce, PhD. Together they created concise videos of appointments demonstrating shared decision-making skills (“how-to” and “how-not-to”) that will be featured in an upcoming Ida Learning Hall course on the building blocks of person-centered care.
Pryce explains why it was a useful project for students to undertake, “Person-centered care is a cornerstone of hearing therapy and all our students practice communication and counseling skills during their time with us. Hearing Therapists need to be experts at combining counseling skills, technical knowledge, and knowledge of language, speech, and communication. Participating in videos like this is a great way to teach concepts like how easy it is for clinical encounters to slip into persuasion or prescription instead of shared decision-making, and to really bring theory to life!”
Julia Côté, Rush AuD student (pictured above), supervised by Patricia McCarthy, PhD created instructional video aids for her final year capstone project to illustrate how the Communication Partners tools can be implemented in the appointment, and how they can work together to guide the person with hearing loss and their partner along their hearing loss journey.
Student attitudes toward PCC
Also under the direction of Patricia McCarthy, PhD, Rush students Anna Benson and Monica Thomas investigated student attitudes toward PCC, leveraging the Ida University network to administer the Patient-Practitioner Orientation Scale – Audiology (PPOS-A) to students. Their results suggest a global trend toward a preference for PCC in audiology students comparable to that of practicing audiologists.
"There is a growing trend towards use of PCC in audiology and health care as a whole. Monica and I were interested in exploring whether audiology students' preferences toward PCC followed suit. Personally, getting to learn more through this project about what PCC is and the mindset behind it has inspired me to incorporate components of PCC with the patients I work with, especially shared goal setting and motivating the patients and their families to be active participants in their hearing healthcare."
Cultural adaptation of Ida resources
Deborah V. Ferrari, PhD and Master’s Student Rodolpho Camargo were awarded an Ida Institute research grant to adapt and assess the Ida Learning Hall Course “Client Engagement and Ida Motivation Tools” for Brazilian Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology undergraduate students. The faculty-student team translated the original course content to Portuguese, and adapated the content to fit Brazilian National Curriculum Guidelines. They also created new video and animation content to make the materials suitable for use in the Brazilian context. In the next phase of the project they began assessing the courses’ efficacy for teaching motivational interviewing. Initial results suggest there was an increase in students’ evaluation of the importance of motivational interviewing and also in their confidence to apply motivational tools. The course will be available shortly as a free online course on Coursera.
Are you or your students working on a person-centered care project? We would love to hear from you.
Information about the next Ida research grant will become available in December.