Bergen Morehouse and Jan Mould from HOSA – Future Healthcare Professional took our audience to the very begging of the health education pipeline. We were back in High School and ready to learn more about using Virtual Patients to engage with High School students.
Engage with future health professionals
Nowadays students are starting to make decisions about their future careers a lot earlier in life, so all the opportunities that HOSA provides are focused on sharing the engagement and excitement of the different careers and pathways that future health professionals can select in health and in the healthcare industry.
In December 2020, HOSA found Body Interact on a google search when looking for a solution capable of maintaining the same level of interaction and dynamism in a virtual conference as in an in-person conference.
Immediately after seeing the simulator in action, Bergen and Jan realized how students would prefer to replace a traditional classroom lecture with a hands-on experience where they can hear, feel and see by themselves what is like to manage and treat a virtual patient.
During HOSA’s International Leadership Conference 2021, Body Interact hosted the first-ever Virtual Patient Challenge for High School Students. Participants had 24 hours to log in to the platform and run the previously selected clinical scenario together as a team.
The top scoring teams moved to the live rounds on zoom to solve a different case, log in remotely to the Body Interact, and diagnose the patient.
As a complement, after the final round, Dr. Kevin Ardon from the Body Interact team was responsible for debriefing each scenario. He provided the context they had just experienced and answered all their doubts and curiosities.
Host your own state competition
This Clinical Competition has been experienced by more students at their State Leadership Conferences. Body Interact has already partnered with Alabama, California, Pennsylvania, Idaho, Texas, and California, and together hosted an online or in-person Virtual Patient Challenge.
Check the video below to review Cal-HOSA students’ testimonials about Body Interact – Virtual Patients:
In the opinion of Bergen and Jan, Body Interact simulation is totally aligned with the HOSA mission because they both promote:
- Critical thinking
- Problem solving
- Teamwork
- Communication skils
When solving a Body Interact clinical scenario, students are also putting into practice knowledge they learn in their day-to-day pre-healthcare professions courses: medical terminology, anatomy and physiology, and interpretation of vital signs.
Together, HOSA and Body Interact are “finding creative ways of introducing virtual patients in students’ classes”. Not only from the advisors’ perspective of enhancing practice and accelerating the learning process but also from a “larger organizational perspective” to “engage and excite future health professionals”.
Never forgetting the most important thing for younger students: Having Fun!
Review the knowledge and experiences shared in the video below:
Get to know HOSA – Future Health Professionals
HOSA is a Career and Technical Education organization that focuses on preparing the future healthcare workforce in the USA and with international Chapters in Canada, China, Korea, and Germany. Most of its members are High School students aged between 14 and 19 who are interested in finding out about the different professional options in health and identifying their future careers.
As a student-led organization, HOSA is focused on developing leadership and communication skills. Within their contact with such young learners, they realize how important it is to provide creative and unique engagement opportunities because if the healthcare sector and industry don’t interest them now, at the begging of the pipeline, they’ll go to other fields.
Also from a training perspective, if they start practicing with virtual patients at an early stage of knowledge development and acquisition, institutions and workforces will receive better-prepared students and confident professionals in their training programs.
by Rita Flores – Body Interact Mkt and Communication Coordinator
