The (COVID-19) pandemic has affected every part of our existence, including education and the economy as we know it. Governments have issued stay-at-home orders, and as a result, colleges and institutions throughout the world have closed.
As a result of the COVID-19 Pandemic and nationwide lockdown, medical education in India has seen significant disruption since March 2020. Measures to avoid spread and therefore social distance have resulted in the closure of medical schools and forced both medical professors and students to work from home. Almost all medical college undergraduate students are transferred to their homes, leaving their hostels immediately before the start of the lockdown, of local, interstate, and foreign travel. As a result, ordinary didactic lecture classes, practicals, tutorials, seminars, clinical (ward, outpatient department [OPD], and OT) posts, and internal assessment assessments are no longer available. Physical attendance of medical teachers/clinicians at workshops, CMEs, symposia, and conferences, on the other hand, has ended.
People are in danger of suffering life-threatening diseases as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, posing significant issues for medical education, as instructors must give lectures safely while simultaneously guaranteeing the integrity and continuity of the medical education process. Due to the concentration on COVID-19 patients, these problems have resulted in restricted patient care, limiting the availability of bedside teaching opportunities for medical students. Therefor they will be unable to complete their clerkships. Clinical rotations for medical students have been halted. Other problems include the possibility that medical students will get the virus during their training and spread it to the population. Students are also expected to stay at home and follow social distancing norms.
What students did?
In the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, medical schools have halted their instructional programmes. However, students were about their current enrollment status and whether they had suspended or paused their education for any other reason. It is been discovered that the majority of students did not suspend their education and were enrolled officially at the start of the pandemic, while some had suspended their education for a variety of reasons. However, some participants claimed that their medical school had halted clinical training and laboratory skills training because of the COVID-19 epidemic, while others reported that their medical school had ceased lectures and educational events. Only a few people reported being in training or volunteering as healthcare allied forces during COVID-19.
During the pandemic, the majority of the students opted to volunteer at hospitals. Furthermore, the majority of students thought they were squandering their study time as a result of the pandemic and subsequent school shutdown. Some of them felt that the pandemic had had an impact on their personal well-being and that they were concerned about getting exposed to COVID-19 during their clinical training. Some of the students felt that their medical professors had advised them throughout the pandemic. Furthermore, the majority of responders stated that the epidemic had impacted the training program's timeframe.
What are the approaches?
Some of the most frequently recommended approaches include planned live online video lectures with interactive discussions, as well as the use of various programmes or self-study online recorded lectures made available online for medical students at each university. Educators must, however, plan to continue providing medical education and patient care during the pandemic, and these services must be carried out in compliance with ethical frameworks based on beneficence and the professional qualities of bravery and self-sacrifice. Another alternative advocated in reaction to the stoppage of clinical clerkship rotations was a virtual clinical experience. This would allow medical students to act as healthcare professionals by interviewing patients, planning treatments with attendants, assisting with paperwork, and counselling patients about their sickness.