Jeremy and colleagues,

Great topic…makes me want to rant on-and-on in a long post J

We have never approached the “pre-season” clinicals as optional and therefore we do not need to “recruit” students to come-in for them.  To do so makes it seem as if the students are coming because your athletics department needs some extra hands… i.e. students are coming as a labor force rather than for an educational experience.  This really isn’t the case, but it appears that way to the students if you conceptualize these vital experiences as optional and recruit for them. 

We need to realize and convey to our students is that this is an EDUCATIONAL experience and treat it as such.  Our colleagues in other health care professions are not hung-up on following the regular year academic calendar with clinicals for their students, so why are we?  The students of the other programs in our school (PT, OT, Rad Tech, Med Tech, respiratory therapy, perfusion and dietetics) do REQUIRED clinical internships over the summers and the students often have to pay for travel to a remote site and secure housing there to do it. They also sometimes get paid for them too… there’s a lesson there for CAATE to consider.  IT’S TIME WE THINK LIKE HEALTH CARE EDUCATORS and leave behind the conceptual limitations of our physical education / kinesiology roots.  We need to think of clinicals as education and not work.  It’s not about labor for two-a-days nor is it a matter of giving students time-off to earn money; it’s about educational requirements for a program of study at a university. Period.  These educational requirements are just as vital and non-negotiable as taking your required coursework.  You can’t skip out on the two-a-days experience any more than you can skip out on taking anatomy. The truth is that an AT student is NOT prepared to practice without having had this experience… preferably several times so they know how to run it when they become an ATC. It’s time we quit producing knowledgeable but unprepared students who don’t understand the demands of the profession they are entering or how to best accomplish these demands.  We need to prepare them to practice, not just to understand how to care for injuries and illnesses. It’s time we realize that the accreditation standards are a MINIMUM set of program requirements and NOT a blueprint for running a program.  This is what institutional autonomy is all about… creating program requirements for the good of the student that make them better prepared (as opposed to just trying to get out of meeting the minimum requirements). When and if we ever get there, we’ll be able to quit using a process driven accreditation and move to an outcome based one like many other health care professions... but that’s a topic for a different rant J

Our approach at Ohio State has always been that the two-a-days clinicals are required vital clinical experiences.  They are required because you will not be a competent practitioner without having experienced them.  It is important that our graduates understand the practice of this profession and two-a-days is an important part of what we do.  It goes beyond just skill proficiency; it gets at affective understanding and appreciation for the organization and demands of the job that athletic trainers do.

For our upper classmen, it is a required part of their autumn quarter clinical rotation and they were informed of the specific assignment in the spring and planned for it. For them, the clinical begins before the classroom part of the autumn quarter education, but it is still a required part of their autumn quarter assignment (you come in when your ACI comes in with the team they oversee).  We struggled with how to better incorporate this phase of clinicals into our educational program for our incoming sophomores (1^st year in the program) because we don’t make their autumn quarter assignments until after we gain a better feel for their strengths and weaknesses based on their two-a-days performance. We addressed this for these new students by creating a separate course about athletic training in the pre-season (ATH TRNG 350 – Managing Risks, Emergencies & Patient Care in the Pre-Season).  It runs on a specially approved alternative-term calendar that runs from the day the students come in until the beginning of the autumn term (it doesn’t match up with either our regular summer term or our fall term). It includes classroom, lab, and clinical components throughout the entire two-a-days period.

Our approach may not work for everyone, but it fits with our program philosophy and mission that education is equally about the classroom and the clinical and you can’t skimp on either. 

Am I on the money or am I off my rocker?  What do others think?

- Mark

Mark A. Merrick, PhD, ATC

Associate Professor & Director

The Ohio State University

Division of Athletic Training

merrick.29@...

614-247-6231