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Telehealth enhances communication across distances, facilitates teamwork, and increases access to care, particularly in rural areas. As the use of telehealth technology assimilates into clinical practice, its integration is also needed in clinical curricula. This project assessed the feasibility and acceptability to engage distancebased students in pediatric clinical simulations using a telepresence robot. Students participated in two pediatric scenarios in teams of three to four prelicensure nursing students, with one nurse practitioner student participating via a telepresence robot. Forty-eight prelicensure and 5 nurse practitioner students completed surveys following clinical simulations. It was feasible to use a telepresence robot as a tool in clinical simulation, and students reported high mean scores on the feasibility and acceptability of using the robot. Although there are challenges, incorporating telepresence technology into simulations opens up many opportunities for student engagement with patients and other clinicians, and affords students with an opportunity to actively participate in their distance-based education.
The adoption of telehealth technologies eliminates location as a barrier to accessing quality health care (Aaltonen, Niemel, & Tammela, 2017; Henderson et al., 2013; Kvedar, Coye, & Everett, 2014; Marcolino, Maia, Alkmim, Boersma, & Ribeiro, 2013). Telehealth technologies open new possibilities for clinicians to engage with patients and other clinicians with an Internet connection around the world and in real time. The benefits of telehealth require care teams to engage with patients and each other in new ways. Telehealth enhances communication across distances, facilitates teamwork, and increases access to care, particularly in rural areas (Amir, Grosz, Gajos, Swenson, & Sanders, 2014; Graves, 2012). As the use of telehealth technology is incorporated into clinical practice, its integration is also needed in clinical curricula (Ali, Carlton, & Ali, 2015; Lee, 2016; Papanagnou, Sicks, & Hollander, 2015). Educators are challenged to find innovative and creative ways to engage healthcare students in telehealth with patients and other clinicians, especially in specialties such as pediatrics. Effective use of telehealth requires competencies in interprofessional collaboration, evidence-based practice, and informatics (American Association of Colleges of Nursing et al., 2011; Gray & Rutledge, 2014; van Houwelingen, Moerman, Ettema, Kort, & Ten Cate, 2016). Moreover, the increasing numbers of online or distance-based clinical programs, decreasing number of clinical placement sites, increasing competition for these sites, and a shift toward increasing...