Kudos to HSAD Faculty and Students for Virtual Internship/Capstone

As we are all aware, traditional face to face activities were cancelled for Spring Quarter 2020.  For Health Services Administration (HSAD) students, this meant their face to face internships and practicums were cancelled.  Working with the HSAD program accreditation organization, their instructor, Ms. Rosalee Allan, was challenged to create a virtual offering for their internship.  In addition, the HSAD students’ traditional Senior Capstone course was modified to avoid face to face interaction.

The 33 HSAD students and Ms. Allan took on these challenges with enthusiasm.  The 2020 Senior Capstone project was developed in collaboration with community healthcare organizations that were going to serve as face to face internship sites.  Several  of these organizations agreed to provide the instructor with their de-identified disaster preparedness plans.  The students’ Senior Capstone project assignment was to review their assigned de-identified disaster preparedness plan, create recommendations and re-write a new draft for the community facility.  Each student also created  a desktop exercise for a pandemic.

The goal was for these disaster plan assessments, refreshed documents and pandemic desktop exercise tools to serve as great resources and support for healthcare organizations already stretched very thin during the pandemic.  This was also an excellent (and timely) learning opportunity for our HSAD graduates – allowing them to gain a critical business skill in disaster planning.  All participating students also  logged these hours with the EWU Office of Community engagement.

Several community organizations who participated commented that they had been working through the COVID event with outdated documents or documents that needed to be refreshed.   Others provided us with state of the art plans that were good examples for our students.   Below are examples of some of the comments received after the final products were delivered:

“Nicely done!  Thank you.  I can take this to our leadership and make plans to update.”                                                                                              Dr. Donald Smith, Jr., Administrator, Sunshine Health and Rehab

 “Thanks Rosalee.  Looks like they did a good job.  I will send out to INMGMA group.  Congrats!”                                                                      Kris Linden, Administrator, OB/GYN Associates of Spokane PS

 “Thank you. What a great project for the students.”                              Cecelia White, Manager, Inland Northwest Health Services

“These documents look great, your students did a fine job, hope it was a useful exercise to all.”                                                                                Mike Schleigh, Director of Plant Operations, Riverview Retirement Community

 “Thank you for sharing your student results – they did a great job on this project!”                                                                                                          Kim Brodie, Chief Operations Officer, Cancer Care Northwest

 “Thank you SO much Rosalee!  I am excited to dig into these.”  Heather Major, CHRO, Incyte Diagnostics