Implementation and evaluation of eight virtual surgical electives for medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Background Eight novel virtual surgery electives (VSEs) were developed and implemented in April–May 2020 for medical students forced to continue their education remotely due to COVID-19. Methods Each VSE was 1–2 weeks long, contained specialty-specific course objectives, and included a variety of teaching modalities. Students completed a post-course survey to assess changes in their interest and understanding of the specialty. Quantitative methods were employed to analyze the results. Results Eighty-three students participated in the electives and 67 (80.7%) completed the post-course survey. Forty-six (68.7%) respondents reported “increased” or “greatly increased” interest in the course specialty completed. Survey respondents’ post-course understanding of each specialty increased by a statistically significant amount ( p -value = <0.0001). Conclusion This initial effort demonstrated that VSEs can be an effective tool for increasing medical students’ interest in and understanding of surgical specialties. They should be studied further with more rigorous methods in a larger population.

Navigating the virtual medical school experience during COVID - What comes next?

“…In addition to expanded virtual lecture resources, some UME institutions have experienced success in utilizing virtual platforms to conduct patient interview sessions with both real and standardized patients. For clinical students, educators have created and/or expanded virtual clerkships and away rotations, 7 morning reports, patient interviews, tele-medicine opportunities, webinars, case discussions, and pre-recorded scenarios. Moving forward, utilizing virtual resources in conjunction with in-person sessions through team/problem-based learning would offer the convenience of technology, while ameliorating the isolating effects of prolonged, exclusive use of virtual platforms.…”

“…8 Despite hands-on clinical learning generally being the most impactful, 2 the relative success of novel virtual clerkships shows promise for further exploration of virtual elective opportunities to facilitate broader exploration among surgical specialties specifically. 7 As healthcare trends toward the utilization of telemedicine and remote monitoring modalities, virtual skills gained will be valuable to serving patients of the present and future. 9 Most importantly, we should nurture the exponential growth of online academic communities via social media platforms, as this encourages inter-institution and international collaboration.…”

The Virtual Team Member: Remote Engagement of Medical Students in COVID-19 Care

“…Unlike pre-clerkship courses where transition to online learning formats has been less disruptive while meeting educational outcomes, preserving the value of clinical experiences would be difficult while physically distanced from patients and the care team. Throughout the pandemic, educators have collaborated with clinical faculty to create virtual educational activities in lieu of paused clinical clerkships such as medicine, surgery, and ophthalmology using combinations from self-study material to online didactic/case discussions and telehealth experiences with variable effect since the objective measures ranged from student specialty interest to knowledge [ 11 – 16 ]. Unpredictable changes in onsite team activities due to the uncertainties of COVID-19 care could lead to inconsistent student experiences in team engagement, supervision, and inclusion in the clinical decision-making process.…”

Re-envisioning undergraduate surgical education during and after the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Like faculty at all of our institutions, Pettitt-Schieber and colleagues at Emory were challenged by the need to pull medical students off the wards because of safety concerns and potential shortages of personal protective equipment at the spring peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. As they describe in this report, 1 they responded by creating a series of eight one to two week online electives that could be offered to students instead. They report here student satisfaction with those offerings, based upon an 81% response rate to their survey across a wide range of disparate offerings.…”

“…Although as I write this, students are back on the wards, it is important that we attempt to learn from our experience with this challenge, whether with online experiences like those described by Pettitt-Schieber and colleagues, 1 or social media use, 12 , 13 or other techniques. First, it remains possible that students may have to leave the wards again in the future, either because of this or some other public health emergency or other local disaster such as a crippling hurricane or flood.…”