Doing a scoping review with undergraduate occupational therapy students in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

In South Africa, the COVID-19 pandemic manifested in March 2020, bringing with it severe disruption and posing unique challenges, globally, to healthcare educators ¹. The pandemic brought a shift in healthcare focus towards essential services, which affected rehabilitation ². The negative impacts on rehabilitation at healthcare facilities included a decrease in patient numbers, termination of 'non-essential' and group services, and staff availability being affected by infection and isolation policies. These factors had a knock-on effect on the training of undergraduate students in occupational therapy. Without access to clinical settings, students lost exposure to both the contexts within which they were being trained to practice in and the realities of the service users they would be seeing. Research activities were similarly disrupted. A prerequisite for graduating as an occupational therapist at Stellenbosch University (SU) is the successful completion of a research project. To expose final year graduates to the theory and practice of research, data collection for projects is usually done in groups within clinical settings, thus affording them insight into the generation of evidence-based practice. With the pandemic disrupting the training occupational therapy students and jeopardizing completion of their studies within normal timeframes, innovative initiatives were needed to address the situation without putting quality education and integrity of education facilities at risk.

This commentary describes such an initiative. A supervised scoping review, that focused on how persons with disabilities in South Africa accessed rehabilitation services in public healthcare facilities, was undertaken with a group of five final year occupational therapy students. The reasoning was that the framework of a scoping review would introduce students to multiple examples of research methodology as well as the rigours of evidence synthesis. A discussed concern was that conducting a scoping review would be too time-consuming and difficult for undergraduate students. To address this concern, structure, and supervision with practical demonstrations, were prioritised. The educational objective was to expose the students to the realities of service users as described in published peer-reviewed primary research.