EWU CHSPH Newsletter April 2017

2017 COLLEGE OF HEALTH SCIENCE AND PUBLIC HEALTH MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN

Greetings from the College of Health Science and Public Health. We are completing our third year as a college and I am excited to share the many ways our faculty and students are contributing to the community and leading innovations in practice and policy.

In partnership with St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Center, we are opening the physical and occupational therapy clinic in the Spokane Teaching Health Clinic. This great partnership with St. Luke’s gives us a way to offer students clinical experiences earlier in their programs while providing a critical service to the community. Eastern students will be receiving a cutting-edge education that positions them well to be leaders in their fields.

Our health service administration and occupational therapy students and faculty are working closely with Excelsior School with organizational leadership and student services that greatly impact the success of the programs and the children and families they serve. Our clinical education faculty for multiple programs in the college are offering an exciting inter-professional continuing education course in motivational interviewing. Our communication sciences and disorders students are working in long-term care facilities to reduce social isolation through See Dean, continued on page 4

ewu.edu/chsph

LT. JESSICA SCRUGGS NAMED KEYNOTE SPEAKER FOR GRADUATION The College of Health Science and Public Health will host its second semester graduation ceremony at the Spokane Convention Center at 10 a.m. on May 5, 2017.

Helping honor and celebrate our graduates is dental hygiene alumna and invited keynote speaker Lt. Jessica Scruggs.

Lt. Scruggs is a Commissioned Corps officer in the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) called to active duty in 2014. She currently serves as the special assistant for the 19th U.S. Surgeon General in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She is responsible for all logistical travel, directs his external engagements in the field, and coordinates with stakeholders inside and outside of the federal government.

Prior to her current assignment, Lt. Scruggs served dual roles providing direct patient care and assisting the medical care coordination at an all-female federal prison in California. In addition, Lt. Scruggs was an adjunct faculty member at Eastern Washington University in the Department of Dental Hygiene and taught public health and career strategies.

In 2009, Lt. Scruggs earned her BA in dental hygiene from Pacific University of Oregon and a Master of Science in dental hygiene from EWU in 2013. She attributes her graduate work at EWU as instrumental in helping her make the career change from corporate dentistry to public health.

Although Lt. Scruggs was not born in the Pacific Northwest, she fell in love with it when she moved there in 2006. No matter where her life may take her, she considers it her home.

MOTIVATIONAL INTERVIEWING IN HEALTH CARE The Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy and Speech and Language Pathology Departments in the College of Health Sciences and Public Health at Eastern Washington University will be hosting a continuing education event.

Friday and Saturday, May 12 and 13, 2017 from 8:45 a.m.–4:40 p.m.

Spokane EWU Center Auditorium 668 North Riverpoint Blvd, Spokane, WA There is a growing need for motivational interviewing training to strengthen the practice skills of health care providers in the Northwest and we would like to extend this opportunity to several disciplines in one large event.

Attendees will receive 12 CEUs for full participation in this event.

The registration fee is $25 for current or future EWU/WSU clinical educators and $125 for all other practitioners.

Follow the link below for online registration. https://commerce.cashnet.com/ewuStoreFrontpay?itemcode=SPO-PTOTCE

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BUILDING A COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIP Two programs in the College of Health Science and Public Health have built a community partnership with Excelsior Youth Center to help EWU students learn while helping the organization in return.

CHSPH’s undergraduate health services administration (HSA) program and graduate occupational therapy (OT) program have formed a partnership with Excelsior, a school and specialty medical clinic that serves a diverse group of young individuals, many of whom may have experienced a form of trauma in their early life.

“Excelsior is a really innovative health care provider. I think we’re moving into an age where we’re increasing integration of service into traditional mode of care – mental health, addiction studies and environment for example,” said Anna Tresidder, PhD and assistant professor of HSA. “They’re taking into consideration the broad definition of health and I think it’s great exposure for our students.”

HSA students conducted eight research projects last spring focusing on different aspects of Excelsior, including data collection on staff retention rates, community-based surveys and analyzing incident reports. Students in one group that conducted a billing analysis found roughly $67,000 in unbilled services over the course of two years.

“We were able to help [Excelsior] with some of those administrative gaps and knowledge gaps to assist their organization because they have so many different things they do,” Tresidder said.

“They’re in the trenches – working day to day, providing services to kids, working with law enforcement. It’s hard for their staff to take a moment, step back, and look at data collected to identify trends.”

Due to the success of their projects, two students presented their Excelsior research at the National Conference of

CHSPH Undergraduate Research (NCUR) in Memphis, Tennessee. This is the first time students from the HSA program attended the conference.

“The students face real challenges head on, especially with a service provider that’s as complex as Excelsior.

They get a really good feel for the complexity of health care delivery – it’s not just, you deliver a service, you get paid for it, you move on,” Tresidder said. “They learn about the different components that provide the supports and barriers in a very complex administration system.”

Simultaneously, six students in EWU’s OT program conducted research for their capstone requirement and fulfilled their fieldwork experience at Excelsior last spring. EWU students collaborated with teachers to create plans for students, gathered information to create sensory rooms and learned about organizational barriers.

“We can’t give those experiences to them in the classroom,” said Donna Mann, OTD, associate dean of CHSPH and associate professor of OT. “You have to be out in the world to have those experiences.”

OT students have successfully identified ways in which Excelsior can make changes to better benefit its students.

“We’re able to improve student learning experiences. A flip side of that is Excelsior is having a positive experience because they’re already

realizing the benefits of having an occupational therapist in their school identify ways for them to make changes and take different approaches in other environments,” Mann said.

The partnership between Excelsior and CHSPH was sparked by Dean Laureen O’Hanlon, PhD, in an attempt to identify how the college can become more involved in the community while creating student opportunities for learning. The success of the partnership has led to Tresidder, Mann and Ryan Kiely, vice president and program operations at Excelsior, conducting a two-hour workshop and presentation at the National American Occupational Therapy Conference in Philadelphia.

“We’re sharing this on the national stage. It is an innovative learning experience,” Tresidder said. “There’s potential for this to evolve into something meaningful for students in the long run.

Ryan, Donna and I are really invested.

We’re always figuring out how to make things work.”

Both Mann and Tresidder attribute the success of the partnership to consistent teamwork and dedication between CHSPH and Excelsior.

“To really dedicate resources and continuously find ways to work together creates an investment that both organizations value,” Tresidder said. “The outcomes are good – the students benefit and the organizations benefit. We stay aware of making sure that the benefits are felt on both sides.”

CHSPH HEALTH PROFESSIONS EDUCATORS’ SUMMER SYMPOSIUM

The 2017 Health Professions Educators’ Summer Symposium (also known as summer quality camp), is co-hosted by the Dartmouth Institute and the University of Missouri Medical School. The symposium brings together a group of approximately 75 educators in health management, medicine and nursing.

The 24th annual symposium is scheduled for the week of July 17-21 in Fairlee, Vermont. Participants are expected to be present for the entire week and to fully engage with the community, participating in social activities, as well as learning activities. Anna Tresidder, PhD was one of only 20 health administration professors to be invited.

The summer symposium’s founder Paul Betalden, MD, a professor emeritus at The Dartmouth Institute, Geisel School of Medicine, has dedicated his career to and is well known for his work on quality improvement and health care, including rethinking the way health care professionals are educated.

The Summer Symposium, now in its 22nd year, got started as a group of educators and professionals who knew and wanted to work with each other to create their own learning environment.

While the group’s overall aim is to improve the quality of health care delivery and professional education, each year summer camp, which mixes short theory bursts with interactive learning and generous time for reflection and discussion, has a different theme.

This year’s theme is: “How can health professions educators positively influence the power dynamics that affect collaboration for improvement of health and health care?”

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COMMUNICATION SCIENCES AND DISORDERS SERVICE-LEARNING EXPERIENCE

Eastern Washington University seniors majoring in communication sciences and disorders (CMSD) are participating in a service-learning experience with local long-term care facilities. Students are paired with residents in the facilities to act as communication partners to ameliorate social isolation and advocate for best care.

The service-learning experience is in conjunction with their CMSD 451 course: Neurogenic Communication Disorders. Students choose from four Spokane/Cheney area long-term care facilities to complete their service: Avalon Long Term Care and Rehabilitation, Manor Care, Alderwood Manor and Cheney Care Center. In addition, one student chose to do her service with the regional office of the Alzheimer’s Association due to her advanced knowledge in issues associated with aging.

“The real-life experiences help students to take what they are learning in the classroom and observe resident behaviors and their own interactions based on course content,” said Jane Pimentel, PhD and professor of CMSD. Academically, students connect their service with course content via Discussion Boards, journal reflections, written essays and class discussion. The service-learning experience serves as pre-clinical training, since most of the undergraduates in the CMSD program continue on to graduate school.

“Most students begin the experience nervous and uncomfortable; many had never visited a long-term care setting or interacted with elders outside of their family,” Pimentel said. “As they try out approaches to communication and gain comfort asking staff questions they begin to experience success and develop relationships with their communication partners.”

Early in the semester, one student’s assigned resident passed away, prompting a short reading and full class discussion on death and dying perspectives specific to elders in long-term care.

“I certainly see the students’ ability to take course knowledge and apply that knowledge in a real-life context but, more importantly, I see emotional growth via increased comfort level with the uncomfortable. I also see a growth in initiative, becoming co-constructors of knowledge along with myself as course instructor, their supervisor at the site, and their peers,” Pimentel said.

Below is one student example from the discussion board: It is really neat that you were able to figure out a meaningful way to communicate with and learn about the resident! I had a similar experience last week. I was transporting a resident back to her room after an activity and I was trying to make conversation with her. She is one of the residents I haven’t spent much time with, and I quickly realized that she had very limited verbal expression. Most of her verbalizations are not intelligible. I was able to figure out some of what she was saying by her gestures and the context. I was getting her settled back in her room and was making sure that she had everything she needed/wanted. She couldn’t respond well to yes/no questions when I asked verbally, but she was able to respond when I gave her a visual along with the verbal. I would ask her a question and use my right hand for yes and my left hand for no. She was able to then point to which hand for yes/no. It was really a great experience to have that break through with her. When we figured out that way to communicate, she got a big smile on her face and the frustration I had seen earlier on was no longer there! It is exciting to see and discover the ways to communicate in meaningful ways!

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CHSPH AND ST. LUKE’S COLLABORATING ON NEW CLINIC EWU’s College of Health Science and Public Health (CHSPH) and St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute have created a collaborative out-patient therapy clinic program located in the recently opened Spokane Teaching Health Clinic (STHC). This program focuses on student learning opportunities within a clinical environment that provides excellence in patient care to meet the health care needs of the local community.

Located on the Spokane campus, STHC is housed in Washington State University’s Spokane Teaching Health Clinic, which was designed, in part, to train future health care providers to collaborate on patient care.

The clinic will open April 27, and will be St. Luke’s 10th out-patient clinic within the community. To start, the clinic will be staffed with three full-time St. Luke’s employees – an admissions coordinator, an occupational therapist and a physical therapist. Therapists hired to work at the STHC will work closely with EWU faculty to provide excellence in education to students enrolled in programs in CHSPH. “Having this clinic and partnership with St. Luke’s gives us a way to give students clinical experiences earlier in their programs, to build clinic-based experiences into our program, to model for our students what inter-professional

CHSPH care looks like when it’s done well, and to give them access to potential participants for research studies,” said Donna Mann, OTD, associate dean of CHSPH and associate professor of OT. The site demonstrates interprofessional care, in which a variety of health care professionals collaborate to provide the best care outcomes in the least disruptive and most cost-efficient way for the client and organizations involved. This means health care professionals will acknowledge overlaps in practice in order to design the most cost-effective service delivery plan while assuring the highest quality outcomes.

“We’re trying to break down those silos of physical therapist, occupational therapist, physician, nurse, etc. We have always traditionally worked well as a multidisciplinary team,” Mann said.

“But in collaborative care, it’s even more of a mesh. It requires tighter teamwork, tighter communication and clearer understandings of the capacity of every profession.”

Mann’s hope for the future of the clinic is to create opportunities for other CHSPH programs, such as communication sciences and disorders, dental hygiene, health science administration and public health students while also focusing on contributing inventive ideas to health care delivery.

“I do believe that the university has an important role to play when

innovations are required,” Mann said.

“And I think innovations are required in health care right now. It’s important that we step up to the plate and help create health care of the future with our community partners.”

An open house for the clinic is scheduled for Wednesday, April 26, from 5-6 p.m. at the Spokane Teaching Health Clinic, 624 E. Front St.

Dean, continued from page 1 communication partners.

Our second semester graduation ceremony is scheduled for May 5 at 8 a.m. at the Spokane Convention Center. Our invited speaker is Lt. Jessica Scruggs, a dental hygiene graduate who serves as the special assistant to the U.S. Surgeon General. We are congratulating Meryl Gersh (left) as she retires from her 32-year career with Eastern Washington University and the Department of Physical Therapy.

As you read these stories I hope you feel the pride as I do for the high impact we are having on the community and our students.

Laureen O’Hanlon, Dean College of Health Science and Public Health

College of Health Sciences and Public Health 668 N. Riverpoint Blvd. Room 133 Spokane, WA 99202-1677

Please recycle.

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