BRIDGING THE DISTANCE TO HELP STUDENTS LEARN PRACTICAL SKILLS Lauren Ahwan

PRACTICAL, hands-on skills are being taught in new ways as educators look to overcome the challenges of social distancing.

While online tools have been critical in ensuring students do not get left behind during the coronavirus pandemic, educators are also embracing more innovative techniques.

At the University of Wollongong, final-year medical students have resorted to suturing raw chicken legs and inserting cannulas into bananas as they seek to brush up on their clinical skills during remote learning.

Normally, the students would use special latex models to practise their skills in a laboratory.

“Our team had to adapt to assisting the students to hone skills learnt over the last few years in their course, through delivering content in an online environment, including by teaching students to insert cannulas on fruit and to suture chicken legs,’’ UOW Associate Professor Rowena Ivers says.

Video conferencing has also allowed students to develop practical skills, with University of South Australia physiotherapy, occupational therapy and exercise physiology students continuing study placements via remote patient consultations.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical students across the globe are using MyDispense, a virtual tool developed by Melbourne’s Monash University that presents various patient scenarios to hone medication dispensing skills.

Keith Sewell, from the university’s faculty of pharmacy and pharmaceutical services, says COVID-19 has forced training organisations to consider new ways of teaching.

“With MyDispense, students are able to practise their dispensing skills within simulated community and hospital pharmacies in a way that is designed to build knowledge, improve cognitive proficiency and develop important soft skills, such as professional values and attitudes,” he says.

Master of Pharmacy student Aisling McEvoy, 20, says having access to MyDispense has helped build confidence in her dispensing skills before graduation.