Integrating Avatar-Based Simulation and Telehealth Practices to Promote Psychosocial Wellbeing: Creating a Realistic Low Stakes Interprofessional Active Learning Environment

Healthcare educators must view themselves as knowledge brokers who create learning opportunities to transmit scientific knowledge, information, and innovations to students to advance person-centered care (Sverrisson, 2001). Knowledge brokers serve as a link between what we know and how we know it, why it is important to know, and ensure that all who need to know have the information. Traditionally, knowledge brokers work in the public domain with patients and the private domain in laboratories (Blondel, 2006). We argue that knowledge brokering must expand into the academic domain. The World Health Organization (2004) noted the need for systems to broker knowledge and enhance the link between policy research and evidence-based policy. In 2018, Thompson and Barcott, developed The Thompson Knowledge Brokering Model to address non-science persons such as patients, vulnerable, and marginalized populations' need for knowledge brokers (Korfmacher, Pettibone, Gray, & Newman, 2016). The Thompson model contains three major components (forming and sustaining partnerships; facilitating knowledge application; and creating new knowledge) and proposes five strategies (establish, engage, educate, empower, and evaluate) to promote knowledge translation. Given the limited amount of attention related to the role of healthcare educators as knowledge brokers, the team at Seton Hall University used this as a lens to develop an Interprofessional Avatar Based Simulation experience to advance health professional students' comfort with employing Telehealth Practices and Addressing Psychosocial Wellbeing. Thompson’s model provided a road map to ensure that as knowledge brokers, the team created learning opportunities that positively affected information availability, access, and health literacy for students specific to telehealth (O'Fallon, Wolfe, Brown, Deary, & Olden, 2003).
The Interprofessional Active Learning Avatar Based Simulation by design sought to prepare healthcare professional students to effectively engage in a live interprofessional team meeting with a transgender college athlete who experienced a concussion impacting their cognitive, physical, and social wellbeing. The goals were to promote the students' 1) knowledge and perceptions of telehealth practices, 2) knowledge and perceptions of a person's psychosocial wellbeing, and 3) ability to work as part of an interdisciplinary team to improve the quality of person-centered care.
This learning experience explicitly addresses the conference goals of 1) Interprofessional Learning for Collaborative Practice and Education and 2) Interprofessional Collaboration to Address Health Equity, Racism, and Bias.
This seminar proposes to advance healthcare educators' role as knowledge brokers by first providing rich descriptions of the strategies employed by the team to develop, implement, and evaluate the Avatar Based Simulation. Second, as knowledge brokers, the presenters will facilitate seminar participants in small group discussions, using mind mapping and problem-based learning strategies to construct additional relevant interprofessional case scenarios that can be employed at their institutions. After attending this seminar participants will be able: 1) to construct, as part of a team, interprofessional person centered telehealth Avatar Based learning scenarios that can be employed at their institutions, 2) adapt the principles associated with the Avatar Based Simulation to promote psychosocial wellbeing and Telehealth practices, and 3) defend their role as knowledge brokers in the academic environment.