COVID-19 and Internship Opportunities at Health Organizations in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Background: Higher education is one of the communities that has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused disruptions and jeopardized supervised internships. COVID-19 has challenged graduating students to find internship opportunities at health organizations during the summer of 2020. Objective: The purpose of this paper was to explore how COVID-19 impacted summer 2020 internship opportunities for graduating health sciences students in Saudi Arabia. Methods: This study is a secondary analysis of existing private data. The data set was extracted from the original data of health sciences students who were expected to do their internships during the summers of 2018, 2019, and 2020 to explore summer internship opportunities. Results: The method of data analysis was descriptive statistics. A total of 440 health sciences students and interns were expected to start their internships during the summers of 2018, 2019, and 2020. Summer internship offers decreased from more than 70% offers in 2018 and 2019 to less than 35% in 2020. Of those who received summer internship offers in summer 2020, the majority received offers from public health organizations (74.67%), while 25.33% received offers from private and other health organizations. Conclusion: The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on summer 2020 internship opportunities at health organizations has been profound in Saudi Arabia. Health organizations were influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic to offer summer internship opportunities for graduating students. This study contributes to understanding the present situation in attempting to predict the future impacts of pandemics with characteristics similar to COVID-19 on internships.