The Felician School of Nursing was a proud recipient of an AT&T Foundation Matching Telehealth Challenge Grant to help prepare nursing students for evolving global and technical advances of health care. This challenge was organized with the support of Felician Trustee, Charlene Brown.

The pandemic highlighted innovative ways of receiving virtual health care via telehealth. Harvard Health Publishing (2021) found that 76% of U.S. hospitals use telehealth and that nearly 25% of adults over age 50 had a virtual visit within the first 3 months of the pandemic.

This project spanned the School of Nursing curriculum and included advanced practice nursing students from the MSN program, accelerated BSN students, and traditional BSN students. All students were educated in telehealth communication and staging skills, patient safety and assessment, technology requirements as well as ethical and legal competencies. The culminating event in April utilized medical actors to play the role of patient in both the Parsippany and Rutherford campuses. A total of 125 students engaged together across the curriculum with very positive feedback about how this experience will help them for future virtual telehealth visits.