In Saudi Arabia, the Ministry of Health (MOH) is the official governmental body that governs the health sector and leads the transformational activities related to the Saudi 2030 Vision which was released in 2016 (1, 2). As a result, the Healthcare Transformation Strategy identifies the challenges and issues that are facing the healthcare sector, was released by the MOH. Some of these challenges are related workforce development, productivity, capacity and capability (3).
Across the health sector in Saudi Arabia, approximately 710,000 healthcare professionals are needed by 2030, which is a 36,000 increase in the labor demand for healthcare professionals over the number that was working during 2019 in the sector (4). Preparing the labor market to meet the demand requires an effective coordination of different sectors, especially between higher education and employers. Health employers heavily rely on qualifications, knowledge, skills, personality and ethics in the process of healthcare hiring which graduates are expected to have (5). Proper training and development of the labor market along with coercing qualified talents to choose the healthcare sector as their career are among the objectives needed to achieve the proper transform of the healthcare sector (6).
Studies about internships are mostly done on the internship experiences of interns who received traditional face-to-face education, but limited studies were done on interns who received blended learning education. Similarly, most studies of the professional competencies of health sciences graduates are done on graduates of traditional schools. The purpose of this paper is to describe the professional competencies of blended learning health sciences graduates through community preceptors’ evaluations of interns in Saudi Arabia.
Competency is described as “a set of success factors that include the key attributes required for excellent performance in a particular role” (7). Professional competence can be divided into two main views: the first view is about a set of essential characteristics or qualifications that individuals must have to perform tasks, and, the second view is about the production and execution of work (8). Health professional competencies include interpersonal health support, community health support, and administrative competencies (9). Interpersonal health support competencies include individual characteristics, communication and experiences; community health support competencies consist of role expectations, responsibilities, teamwork, skills and knowledge; and administrative competencies include organizing, planning, and monitoring (9–11). A fourth competency is identified as nontechnical competencies, which are related to but not limited to adaptability, motivations, cooperation, ethics, and creativity (11, 12).
Knowledge, skills and experience are related to personal and organizational factors positively associated with the accumulative development of competencies (9). The knowledge and awareness of role expectations can be obtained through educational and academic institutions that offer academic degree programs and professional associations that offer professional continuing education courses. Training plays a major role in supplying and endowing health professionals with the required skills and experiences (9).
An international survey on internship quality that was conducted in 2011 mentioned that formal education alone is not enough to allow a job seeker to access to the job market (13). The International Labour Office (ILO) described an internship as “a limited period of work experience with an employer usually lasting between a few weeks to one year but which is neither part of a regular employment relationship nor a formal apprenticeship” (14). Academic programs aim to provide students with opportunities where they can apply classroom knowledge to real-life settings. Generally, students have a positive view of internships as they gain a deeper understanding of their professions and develop their personal professional skills through internships (5, 15, 16). On the other hand, employers’ perceptions of student internships may vary due to different reasons such as the organization’s size, the number of employees, being for-profit or nonprofit, and other reasons (15, 17). In Saudi Arabia, most health sciences related academic programs have internships as a part of their curriculum structures, which vary between different educational institutions since they vary in learning and educational styles and include the following: regularity, correspondence, distance learning, and blended learning (18).
Blended Learning in general is the interactive mixture of traditional teaching and electronic learning methods (19). There are three types of blended learning (BL): a combination of traditional face-to-face and online learning, a combination of different technologies, and a combination of different methodologies (20). Some Australian universities highlighted issues with medical students who received traditional education having limited skills regarding nontechnical engagements such as team work, creative thinking, self-regulation, and critical thinking. As a result, medical students were introduced to a blended learning program that aims to supply medical students with nontechnical skills via online discussion, digital evaluations, online case scenarios, and face-to-face activities. Interestingly, the program has become a fundamental program and developers were given incentives to continue their development (21). A Dutch study was conducted to study the perceptions of general practitioners (GP) trainers through blended learning interventions. GP trainers positively evaluated blended learning in both knowledge and practice (19). Again, very limited studies in the literature regarding the internships designed to bridge the gaps between educational and professional competences in health sciences were done on blended learning graduates. In this paper, we will describe community preceptors’ evaluations of blended learning health sciences interns from the perspective of employers.