ABSTRACT
Background The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for strong infection prevention and control knowledge and elimination of practice gaps in healthcare, academic, and public health settings nationwide. As a result, Project Firstline (PFL) is a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-led, multiyear national training grant created in 2019/2020 to fund a collaborative of diverse healthcare, public health, and academic partners to develop training to strengthen foundational knowledge and implementation of healthcare infection prevention and control (IPC). Healthcare workers need and deserve transparent and trustworthy information on CDC's infection control recommendations and the science behind them. Project Firstline aims to deliver comprehensive, transparent, innovative, and responsive education and training to healthcare and public health workers in the United States. Project Firstline builds an IPC foundation of knowledge, education, and training expertise within the healthcare, academic, and public health workforce to support IPC culture across all healthcare communities. Partner engagement is crucial to sharing information across all health care settings via trusted channels to ensure content and tools are delivered to the health care professionals who need them and in ways facilitating use of new knowledge in clinical practice. To promote behavioral change, education needs to build and reinforce a universal understanding of the rationale for Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) practices. These practices must be evaluated to provide targeted training. In addition, to reach, be practical, and have a high impact across all levels of staff, training should be a collaborative learning experience and fit the learners' needs, abilities, and education. Therefore, training needs to be developed to address core competencies for the performance of IPC practices known to reduce issues and promote safety for all healthcare workers. To appropriately address the needs of a diverse workforce, information is needed to assess the following elements related to learning needs: preferred approaches for training delivery and post-training support, prior infection control training experience, confidence in and the capacity to implement infection control recommendations, practices, and training needs. The areas of infection control practices include specific COVID-19 recommendations, hand hygiene, personal protective equipment (PPE), source control, triage and screening, and environmental cleaning.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: During the COVID-19 pandemic many nursing educators have been required to abruptly convert to an online delivery model. Faculty need resources and support to transition face to face courses into an online format. PURPOSE: The purpose of this article is to highlight nursing faculty perceptions of the effectiveness of resources, support, and methodologies for online teaching during the COVID-19 Pandemic. METHODS: A cross-sectional descriptive survey design was used to collect data about nursing faculty resources, support and methodologies used to transition at least one undergraduate or graduate degree nursing course to an online format during the COVID-19 pandemic. RESULTS: Eighty-four faculty who taught in ten university colleges of nursing used varied teaching methodologies in online courses, but included some consistent methods such as websites and web based tools. The student engagement strategies that faculty were most satisfied with were journal writing and projects. Most faculty reported having information technology support and access to instructional design resources. CONCLUSION: Nursing faculty were resourceful, adaptive, and willing to use both novel and existing resources and methodologies to meet their teaching objectives and engage students. They were also, overall, satisfied with the administrative support they received from their respective institutions. Many of these resources, methodologies, and supports will continue to be used by faculty as likely more programs and courses will continue to be managed online.