Developing competence in health advocacy among physiotherapy technology students through service learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
V. Gangai1, C. Clausen2, A. Shoham21Dawson College, Physiotherapy Technology, Montreal, Canada, 2University of Sherbrooke, Education, Sherbrooke, CanadaBackground: The population in Canada is aging and it is questionable whether our healthcare system will be able to manage all the difficulties that people face as they get older. Consequently, our healthcare system may be facing a crisis as people have greater difficulty accessing necessary services and as costs to tax payers climb dramatically.Health advocacy involves promoting health and wellness with the goal of potentially reduce individuals’ risks of sustaining injuries and developing certain diseases. However, healthcare professional education has not been formally addressing health advocacy in curriculum thereby not meeting this societal need. As advocacy is not addressed, students emerging from Physiotherapy Technology programs are missing crucial attitudes and skills necessary to engage in effective wellness promotion and disease prevention. As a result, healthcare professionals may be missing out on valuable opportunities to engage in health promotion and potentially reduce people’s risks of developing preventable conditions.Purpose: This project aimed to contribute to the discussion on pedagogy in healthcare worker education. This study determined whether and to what extent students’ attitudes towards a health advocacy role changed throughout a Geriatrics service-learning course in a Physiotherapy Technology program. It also identified to what extent students feel more competent to engage in health advocacy following this type of course.Methods: This study used a convergent mixed methods approach. As part of standard curriculum, 17 third-year students engaged in a 15-week service-learning course during which they worked with seniors at a community centre. Students designed exercise and wellness modules that they offered to community participants on a weekly basis. They also sought to identify potential risks in the seniors’ profiles and attempted to address these risks with education that focused on prevention. During this course, students reflected on their learning by way of four reflective journals that were written at 5-week intervals. These journals were analyzed using qualitative descriptive analysis. As part of this study, students also completed a pre-course and post-course survey that measured changes in students’ attitudes and perceived level of competency with respect to the health advocacy role. Quantitative data was statistically analyzed using t-tests.Results: Qualitative data revealed a meaningful change in students’ attitudes and perceived level of competency following the service-learning course. As students gained more robust knowledge of advocacy and developed more empowering, hopeful attitudes towards the role, they were better positioned to engage in the critical reflection needed to build their competency. This was supported by the quantitative data that revealed a significant change in both attitude and self-reported level of competency following the service learning course.Conclusion(s): These results suggest that service-learning could be a potentially interesting instructional strategy for programs that aspire to foster development of the advocacy competency in their students.Implications: The results generated by this study could inform curriculum development and planning in Physiotherapy programs throughout the world. Such a practice has the potential to ultimately improve the quality of care received by the public and the health of society.Funding, acknowledgements: This work was unfunded.Keywords: Physiotherapy Technology, Health Advocacy, Service LearningTopic: Education: methods of teaching & learningDid this work require ethics approval? YesInstitution: Dawson CollegeCommittee: Dawson College Research Ethics BoardEthics number: GANGV1819146All authors, affiliations and abstracts have been published as submitted.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".