From leadership research to district action: COVID-19 and VA Medical Education Training Programs: Influence on Trainees and Contributions of Trainees to VA’s Pandemic Response

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Abstract Background The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has prioritized efforts to understand the influence of COVID-19 on VA clinicians and the overall VA system of care. Given the importance of health professions trainee (HPT) contributions to clinical and research activities, it is important to understand HPT contributions to VA’s work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Objective This study evaluated the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on VA HPTs and the contributions of HPTs to VA’s pandemic response. Design Across selected VA sites, semi-structured interviews were used to gather perspectives from three participant groups: (1) HPTs across three disciplines at different levels of training, (2) service chiefs representing the disciplines in which the HPTs received training, and (3) educational leadership. Interviews were conducted in 2021. Participants Stratified sampling was used to identify 10 VA medical sites, from which 83 participants were purposefully sampled. Approach Descriptive content analysis was used to iteratively analyze collected data. Key Results HPTs reported decreased learning opportunities and increased safety concerns related to COVID-19 during their training placements. HPTs were seen as providing important contributions to multiple aspects of VA’s efforts to respond to challenges related to COVID-19, including providing needed clinical care, supporting VA’s shift to telehealth, providing informational and emotional support to Veterans, helping with COVID planning and decision-making, and fostering a positive work environment. Conclusions Although COVID-19 presented limitations to HPT involvement in VA activities, HPTs made meaningful contributions to care delivery and brought skills to support VA’s transition to virtual care delivery. HPTs are an important group to be included in future emergency response planning within VA. NIH Trial Registry Number Not applicable. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-026-10522-3. KEY WORDS: Graduate medical education, Crisis response, Pandemic response, Program evaluation

Study methods

This study is part of a larger evaluation using pragmatic qualitative methods, originally designed before the COVID-19 pandemic, exploring HPT contributions to the VA system of care. All HPT and supervisor interviews were conducted in 2021. During the development of the interview guide, OAA leadership expressed interest in understanding how the COVID-19 pandemic affected HPT training experiences and therefore one question specifically asking about the influence of COVID-19 on HPT training and contributions to VA’s COVID response was added to the interview. Interviewers also probed to understand how COVID impacted HPTs’ training experience. The findings presented in this report represent the results of these questions and investigated the experiences and contributions of UGME and GME HPTs within VA HPT programs during COVID across three medical disciplines: medicine, surgery, and psychiatry.

Limitations

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A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Linda M Kawentel; C Ann Vitous; Sharon M Nelson; Gezan M Yahya; Joanna S Doredla; Karen Sanders; Nicholas W Bowersox. COVID-19 and VA Medical Education Training Programs: Influence on Trainees and Contributions of Trainees to VA’s Pandemic Response. Journal of General Internal Medicine (2026-05-27). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-026-10522-3

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.