HOLISTIC Cohort Study

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HOLISTIC: Health Professional Students at the University of Illinois at Chicago Cohort Study

HOLISTIC, a cohort study conducted by an interprofessional team of students and faculty from across the UIC health science colleges completed three years of data collection in February 2023. HOLISTIC is a survey based research study that collects demographic information, portions of the Brief Risk Factor Surveillance System survey run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a modified version of the SAGE Working Group Vaccine Hesitancy Scale. HOLISTIC gathers data on the health and health behaviors of health professionals in training at UIC and alumni. Like many other things that were initiated in early 2020 as the COVID 19 pandemic began, HOLISTIC , began at the time when there was a historic opportunity to understand the impact of an unprecedented disruption in health professions training.

While HOLISTIC provides valuable to UIC about our own students, results also add to what is currently a very limited amount of published literature about the health and health behaviors of health professions student and early career health professionals.  The potential for designing health promotion efforts is one very positive application of HOLISTIC findings – but the ability to measure impact of interventions for emerging and existing concerns is equally important. UIC’s diverse health professions student body adds a valuable dimension.

In 2024, UIC will participate in the Healthy Minds Study, a campus wide survey

The UIC Institutional Review Board has approved the HOLISTIC Cohort Study with IRB Protocol # 2021-0114.

HOLISTIC Cohort Study Update! Heading link

Since its initiation in late 2019, the HOLISTIC research team has published 2 papers in peer reviewed journals.

  1. Dommaraju, S. R., Rivera, S. G., Rocha, E. G., Bicknell, S., Loizzo, D., Mohammad, A., Rajan, P., Seballos, A., Datta, A., Ahmed, R., Krishnan, J. A., & Keehn, M. T. (2022). Health professional students at the university of illinois chicago cohort study: A protocol. PloS One, 17(8), e0269964. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269964
  2. Loizzo, D., Datta, A., Dommaraju, S., Abdulbaseer, U., Krishnan, J., Keehn, M., & Rashid, A. (2022). COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among health professional students: Cross-sectional data from the first wave of the HOLISTIC cohort study. Vaccines (Basel), 10(9), 1566. https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines10091566

Please contact Dr. Keehn or email HOLISTIC@uic.edu with any questions or to find out more about HOLISTIC!