Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

COVID-19 has been challenging for nearly everyone in different ways. Healthcare organizations have had to quickly change policy, modify operations, reorganize facilities, hire, and train staff to overcome COVID-19 related challenges to be able to still provide care for patients, all while being mindful of the protection of their staff. Some healthcare organizations have responded particularly well, perhaps due to preparedness, planning, or exceptional leadership in times of crisis. To explore this, we invited seven healthcare system leaders from three different organizations in Arizona to talk about how they overcame challenges at the beginning of this pandemic with effective strategies and any leadership tips they had for the future. After the interviews were conducted, the interviews were transcribed, coded qualitatively, and separated into themes and categories to analyze their answers to the questions asked. The results and conclusions included strategies such as having open and honest communication, teamwork, rapidly developing communicating policies, and widely adopting new work practices like Telemedicine, Zoom, and working at home as crucial. This report is designed to assist in aiding and inspiring future or other leaders to be better prepared for solving various challenges with other emergencies that arise in the future.

Food is one of the most universal and uniting human experiences. It is a powerful tool to bring communities together and it is a simple way to bring joy to an individual. This project is an exercise in marketing and entrepreneurship that was inspired by these ideas, which culminated in a fundraiser bake sale to benefit Creighton Community Foundation, a local nonprofit.

In January of 2022, 61 women from Afghanistan were accepted to Arizona State University and joined our campus from the Asian University of Women. Of One Heart is a Phoenix based nonprofit which aims to connect refugees with mentors to cultivate intercultural relationships, assist refugees in integrating into a new community, and to empower refugees to utilize their unique perspectives and talents in their new home. In addition to these goals, these relationships aim to connect refugees with the networks their mentor has and to assist them in understanding the new systems and norms of American culture. The relationship is reciprocal in the sharing of background and stories to facilitate trust and to recognize the value refugees have to contribute to society. The mission of this project is to implement the Of One Heart mentoring model onto ASU campus to help facilitate intercultural friendships between our new students from Afghanistan and other ASU students, faculty and staff. In doing so, we hope to create a model demonstrating refugee student success by collecting data through pre and post program surveys to track if involvement in the program improved participants utilization of existing ASU resources, cultural competency, mental health, and participation in community activities and internships/job opportunities. Ideally, we hope to create a program model which is proven to support refugee students to be replicated for future semesters as the program expands to serve not only the students from Afghanistan, but all refugee and asylum seeking students.

Aphasia is an impairment that affects many different aspects of language and makes it more difficult for a person to communicate with those around them. Treatment for aphasia is often administered by a speech-language pathologist in a clinical setting, but researchers have recently begun exploring the potential of virtual reality (VR) interventions. VR provides an immersive environment and can allow multiple users to interact with digitized content. This exploratory paper proposes the design of a VR rehabilitation game –called Pact– for adults with aphasia that aims to improve the word-finding and picture-naming abilities of users to improve communication skills. Additionally, a study is proposed that will assess how well Pact improves the word-finding and picture-naming abilities of users when it is used in conjunction with speech therapy. If the results of the study show an increase in word-finding and picture-naming scores compared to the control group (patients receiving traditional speech therapy alone), the results would indicate that Pact can achieve its goal of promoting improvement in these domains. There is a further need to examine VR interventions for aphasia, particularly with larger sample sizes that explore the gains associated with or design issues associated with multi-user VR programs.