Preface

In athletic training education, students must have a clinical education component where the knowledge and application of educational domains are integrated into real life situations. The students must be able to critically think and discern what is going on with an injured or ill athlete. The students have numerous classes teaching them foundational knowledge like the signs and symptoms of injuries, mechanisms of injuries, and treatments for injuries. When athletic trainers are presented with a situation, they must utilize all of their clinical knowledge regarding proper prevention, recognition, and rehabilitation management. Recently, the athletic training Board of Certification (BOC) has incorporated scenarios with corresponding questions on the certification exam in order to test students' ability to synthesize the foundational knowledge they have learned and to test the students' ability to apply this knowledge to real clinical scenarios. When an athlete is injured or sick, the athletic training student must be able to collect all of the necessary information, evaluate the problem, and deduce the assessment or diagnosis. This clinical reasoning skill is a difficult task for many athletic training students to master. The students may know the information, but they have difficulty putting it all together to gain a conclusion and thus a treatment plan.

This clinical workbook is a collaboration of clinical scenarios that, as a whole, touch on each educational domain within Athletic Training Programs (ATP) accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Athletic Training Education (CAATE), thus enhancing the clinical education component of an ATP's curriculum. The goal of this workbook is to teach athletic training students how to formulate a mental checklist to identify an assessment or treatment plan when presented with a clinical scenario. This helps students develop their critical thinking skills, thus increasing their clinical competence in athletic training skills and improving their success rate on the BOC exam. The workbook may be used as a requirement for clinical practicum classes, as a supplement for classes, or in the clinical setting during student "downtime." This workbook is designed to parallel the fifth edition of the Athletic Training Education Competencies and to be used in conjunction with the foundational knowledge textbooks within ATP curriculums.

This product benefits professors, program preceptors, student athletic trainers, and Athletic Training Programs (ATPs). Professors can use this product as the required text for clinical practicum classes. The Commission on Accreditation of Athletic Training Education (CAATE) Standards for clinical education notes that athletic training students must have a clinical portion within their program and must have instruction and formal assessment of clinical skills prior to performing those skills on a patient. The workbook entries by the students can serve as another form of instruction and then can be reviewed by the professor, which will allow the professor to see the thought process of his or her students. This will then help the professor guide the students who may be struggling with their critical thinking processes.

A program preceptor can assess the Clinical Integration Proficiency (CIP) of athletic training students. The new CIPs are skills that students must demonstrate in the context of real patient care. The questions and tearout flashcards found in this workbook will give the preceptors new ideas to spark conversations about clinical scenarios when actual scenarios may be few and far between in the clinical setting.

Students will be able to use this product for some of the same reasons as the preceptors. Frequently, in athletic training, students won't have the opportunity to observe injuries every day. Therefore, they can work through this workbook and flashcards to supplement a slow day in the field. Additionally, this product helps to develop their critical thinking skills to be a better athletic trainer and increases their confidence in decision-making involved in regard to patient care. This workbook may also improve students' success rate on the BOC exam because it covers scenarios from each educational domain that may possibly be covered in the scenario questions on the BOC exam.

This workbook is beneficial to the athletic training program as a whole by evaluating student learning and decision-making abilities. Initially, formal instruction and evaluation of knowledge and skill occurs in the core academic classes in the curriculum. However, this workbook serves as an opportunity to measure a student's ability to use classroom knowledge when considering a holistic patient treatment plan. The perforated pages in the workbook also allow the student to submit completed scenarios that may be logged as completion of a particular skill for program assessment and tracking purposes.

Beyond the audience of athletic training, this workbook may be used by medical school students, emergency medical technicians (EMTs), physical therapy students, and the members of any other health profession that manages injuries incurred from athletics or physically active people.

This workbook parallels the current athletic training curriculum and incorporates the fifth edition of the Athletic Training Education Competencies. This content can be accessed on NATA's website: http://www.nata.org/sites/default/files/5th-Edition-Competencies-2011-PDFVersion.pdf. Students may use this tool to sharpen their evaluation skills and critical thinking skills to improve their performance in the field. Professors and preceptors may use this workbook to challenge their students' critical thinking skills and prompt them to think in "real world" terms.