Intention to vaccinate against COVID-19 and potential outreach strategies for a residential research university in Northeastern Ohio.

INTRODUCTION: A university's understanding of student, faculty, and staff members' intention to vaccinate against COVID-19 has been vital in returning safely to in-person education, research, and engagement with communities and professions. We employed a novel survey to describe intentions across subpopulations of one campus and consider key issues in their rationales for intentions and hesitancies. MATERIALS AND METHODS: 1,077 surveys based on Theory of Planned Behavior were completed from randomly selected pools of undergraduate students, graduate students, part-time faculty, full-time faculty, and staff. Chi-Squared Automated Interaction Detection algorithm analysis provided paths for evaluation. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: 83 percent of respondents said they would receive the vaccine at their first opportunity, while 5 percent said they would never get the vaccine; the remaining 12 percent wanted more evidence before getting the vaccine. Findings included negative health perceptions of the vaccine, misinformation on the process, as well as negative rhetorical responses differentiated between political partisanship and membership within the campus community, eg, faculty, staff, or student. IMPLICATIONS: Universities seeking to raise campus vaccination rates should concentrate limited resources on the largest populations with the most opportunity to vaccinate. In this study, newer students, with conservative political views, represented a population of opportunity. Their formative beliefs may be influenced by messaging and in collaboration with students' personal physician and/or friend groups. A theory-based approach leads to focused efforts for safer campuses and resumption/continuation of face-to-face interactions for students, faculty, and staff.

EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT ON THE WILD SIDE

The University of Akron offers a senior-level progressive experiential course in which learners encounter stress as initial responders through managing the decisions and stress of wilderness adventure races in a tabletop exercise. The unique context of remote emergencies puts learners in an equal field of ignorance of competencies and stress management, allowing for increased stress levels to be developed and managed throughout the course. Unique to the course is the implementation of a wilderness first aid course for community partners, where students grow in facilitating professional development while meeting a community need. The three phases allow personal and team-based professional competencies to be practiced and tested through the experiential educational model.

The FAST VIP (First Aid for Severe Trauma "Virtual" in-Person) Educational Study.

INTRODUCTION: Trauma is the leading cause of death for young Americans. Increased school violence, combined with an emphasis on early hemorrhage control, has boosted demand to treat injuries in schools. Meanwhile, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has made educating the public about trauma more difficult. A federally funded high school education program in development, called First Aid for Severe Trauma™ (FAST™), will teach students to aid the severely injured. The program will be offered in instructor-led, web-based, and blended formats. We created a program to prepare high school teachers to become FAST instructors via "virtual" in-person (VIP) instruction. We used a webinar followed by VIP skills practice, using supplies shipped to participants' homes. To our knowledge, no prior studies have evaluated this type of mass, widely distributed, VIP education. METHODS: This study is a prospective, single-arm, educational cohort study. We enrolled a convenience sample of all high school teachers attending FAST sessions at the Health Occupations Students of America-Future Health Professionals International Leadership Conference. Half of the participants were randomized to complete the Stop the Bleed Education Assessment Tool (SBEAT) prior to the webinar, and the other completed it afterward; SBEAT is a validated tool to measure learning of bleeding competencies. We then performed 76 VIP video-training sessions from June-August 2020. The FAST instructors assessed each participant's ability to apply a tourniquet and direct pressure individually, then provided interactive group skills training, and finally re-evaluated each participant's performance post-training. RESULTS: A total of 190 (96%) participants successfully applied a tourniquet after VIP training, compared to 136 (68%) prior to training (P < 0.001). Participants significantly improved their ability to apply direct pressure: 116 (56%) pre-assessment vs 204 (100%) post-assessment (P < 0.001). The mean score for the SBEAT increased significantly from pre-training to post-training: 2.09 with a standard deviation (SD) of 0.97 to 2.55 post-training with a SD of 0.72 (P < 0.001). CONCLUSION: This study suggests that a webinar combined with VIP training is effective for teaching tourniquet and direct-pressure application skills, as well as life-threatening bleeding knowledge. VIP education may be useful for creating resuscitative medicine instructors from distributed locations, and to reach learners who cannot attend classroom-based instruction.