The pandemic is resurging and these new surges in Covid 19 infections have forced several states and universities to pause their reopening plans or even re-implement some lockdown measures initially implemented last spring.
Today, on college campuses, many faculty and students fear attending in-person classes. Colleges, large and small, are in severe financial difficulty because of the pandemic. For example, Stanford University, one of the wealthiest institutions of higher education in the country, will cut 11 of its 36 varsity sports for financial reasons. This cutback is yet another sign that the financial uncertainty wrought by Covid-19 will be experienced in nearly every aspect of university life, on virtually every campus.
Will academic programs and their clinics that cannot sustain themselves financially also succumb to the financial crisis in higher education?
Unlike medical school training clinics, which charged fully for services, academic audiology program training clinics at their inception offered free services. More recently, many universities required their audiology clinics to be revenue-neutral. Now, the economic collapse accompanying the pandemic may well require that academic audiology clinics become profitable.
Financial uncertainty, together with restrictive pandemic infection controls and deepening dependence on telehealth, require academic clinics to operate very differently than in the pre-pandemic world.
Pandemic handbook for Academic Audiology Clinics
In the second part of a new pandemic handbook for academic audiology clinics, Rose Delude and Donald Nielsen, both of the Fuel Medical Group, provide help and advice on winning university financial support by improving the clinic business model.
They also explain how to deal with the numerous pandemic response mandates and obstacles affecting academic audiology clinics. Like Part 1, which dealt with the education program, this second part is being launched on the CAPCSD website.
Part 2 of the handbook is available at this link.
