Training During Social Distancing: The Effects of Remote Virtual Psychiatric Readiness Curriculum on Military...

There is inconsistency in the training of military medical providers on the regulations and procedures outlining US Army-specific psychiatric readiness related competencies. These competencies are necessary to ensure the appropriate categorization of a soldier's psychiatric readiness. There exists a need for a formal, comprehensive training curriculum accessible to all providers that is time- and cost-effective. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is are additional barriers of social distancing, remote virtual healthcare delivery, and geographic dispersion of healthcare personnel. To address these concerns, we developed a curriculum to target these competencies and deliver them virtually. The curriculum was developed and executed based on Kern's six-step approach to curriculum development, and the objective was to train military behavioral health providers on temporary duty limitations, administrative separations, and medical board referrals based on current US Army policies and procedures. The training was implemented virtually and conducted over the course of 3-hour training sessions to two separate groups. Evaluation of training objectives was conducted via a survey of paired before and after questions, analyzing the change in perceived confidence among learners. Among the 58 respondents, training resulted in statistically significant improvement in confidence in recognizing when a US Army soldier needs a temporary profile, writing a temporary e-profile, deciding when it is critical to contact a US Army soldier's commander, executing administrative separation, deciding when a US Army soldier is at medical retention determination point (MRDP), and in referring a US Army soldier to medical board. Results show the feasibility of virtual training to enhance medical readiness-related competencies of healthcare providers at the enterprise-level to help improve medical readiness. Limitations included immediate and subjective aspects of our results. It is unclear whether our training or similar training sessions resulted in changes in behaviors such as increased profiling or medical board referrals.