OHPF Class of 2022 Update – Challenges and Lessons from the Time of COVID

For more than 25 years, the Osteopathic Health Policy Fellowship has mentored over 250 mid-career DOs and other individuals with a connection to the osteopathic profession to engage in health policy discussions, analysis, formulation, and advocacy. The success of the program is attributable to several factors, the most important being connecting fellows to experts and organizations intimately involved with a broad range of issues across the program’s eleven session year. It also develops a strong bond between the Fellows that transcends the program, fostering lifelong collegial relationships and friendship.

The pandemic of 2020-2021 challenged the Fellowship in the same way it challenged almost every aspect of the profession. Our in-person meetings ended after the March 2020 session (Fellowship year 2020-2021), cutting short the program by four sessions, including the final Congressional office visit program and the capstone policy brief exercise. Although virtual sessions were employed to cover the missed material, these opportunities did not provide the same collegial environment. Similarly, the Fellowship class of 2021-2022 began with virtual sessions that covered basic orientation, introduction to critical fellowship issues, discussions with issue experts, including a session with Randy Danielsen, PhD, Director of ATSU-SOMA’s Center for the Future of the Health Professions, and completion of the first of two policy brief writing assignments. Although the Fellowship has continued these last 18 months, the true connectedness fostered with organizations and policy experts, as well as within the Fellows themselves, has not provided as rich of an environment that is the foundation of the program.

We remain optimistic that the trajectory of the pandemic will allow us to, once again, begin the traditional offering of in-place meetings in early 2022. We have secured commitments from ATSU-SOMA for mid-January and from the NYIT-COM Arkansas campus for February and are well into the planning of those sessions. We are also in discussions with other sites to secure meetings for the completion of the 2021-2022 class and to secure the calendar for the 2022-2023 class.