Anka Roberto

During the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth utilization grew astronomically, encouraging more institutions of higher education to become innovative and proactive in preparing health care providers to deliver high-quality telehealth care. Telehealth can be creatively implemented throughout health care curricula given the appropriate guidance and tools. This article speaks to the development of student telehealth projects as part of the work of a national taskforce funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration and charged with the development of a telehealth toolkit. Proposed telehealth projects allow students to take the lead in their innovative learning and allow faculty to facilitate project-based evidence-based pedagogy.

Mentorship is an underestimated asset that focuses on growth and accomplishments and offers broad forms of support to students from marginalized populations, including intersectional and overlapping identities. This article aims to identify the gaps in current literature regarding mentorship, propose an adaptive mentorship model and identify the model's strengths in practice. Traditional mentorship models focus on one specific aspect of student identity, and this gap marginalizes an individual's identity's duplicity or multi-faceted complexity. Such models often offer great educational support but dismiss the value of high-impact research. High-impact research has been shown to positively impact marginalized communities because it allows the unique opportunity to engage in all stages of research. The model described in this paper is grounded in principles of collaboration and cooperation across an interdisciplinary team. Each faculty mentor and mentee possess intersectional and overlapping identities adding unique perspectives and resilience to the work they engage in. This resilience is united with various intersectional study complexities in behavioral sciences, medicine, social studies, and humanities. Thus, it offers a strengths-based experience that widens student opportunities and challenges unitary models of peer-peer/peer-to-adult mentorship patterns.

Spirituality has been known to have a positive correlation to resilience during disasters. This study investigated the impact of spirituality on resilience during our current pandemic. A mixed-method approach was used to analyze correlations between spirituality and resilience of women. Correlations were noted to be statistically significant with Pearson’s correlation of –.450 at 0.001, CD-RISC (M = 77.94), and DSES (M = 39.74). Thematic analysis of six open-ended questions provide depth to quantitative findings supporting the positive influence of spirituality on resilience, hope, optimism, peace, and comfort suggesting that spirituality may be an important dimension as this pandemic continues to unfold across the globe.