The COVID-19 pandemic has had an important impact on medical education. Many universities from different countries faced temporary closures at the very beginning of the pandemic, and were quick to adapt and offer an online experience for students. However, this has come with a cost, and specifically a social and educational cost.
While the switch to complete online teaching and online examinations was relatively short, mostly throughout the second semester of the 2019-2020 university year, a mix of online and on-site teaching continued throughout the 2020-2021 university year.
In Romania, the infectious diseases module is taught in the last year of medical school. During this 6-week clinical rotation, the students integrate the knowledge from all different medical specialties in the differential diagnosis and management of infections and work side-by-side with the clinical teaching staff.
Unfortunately, much of the patient interaction was lost during online teaching, and the two MD generations that have graduated since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic have unfortunately missed out on several opportunities to train for real world clinical practice.
Medical residency programs that started on January 1st 2021 and 2022, respectively, had to adapt and to provide specific guidance to ensure the integration of the new residents into the clinical pathway, making up for the lost clinical time during the online-only teaching time span. Information that would have been naturally acquired during on-site teaching, had to now be included in their residency training, with particular emphasis on how to interact with patients, how to perform a complete and a targeted clinical exam, along with more technical approaches, such as how to manage patient records and what administrative pathways need to be followed to prescribe different drug categories. This led to a lengthening of the time span needed for new residents to function autonomously, of course under the close supervision of specialists and senior specialists, but eventually all the necessary knowledge and know-how was put into place, albeit with more effort than in the pre-online era.
While online teaching did come with certain shortcomings, we should also acknowledge the fantastic development of online education platforms, and the rapid implementation of virtual patient case simulators and manikins for teaching and practicing clinical skills.
Looking towards the new university year that starts October 1st, we welcome a full return of students to face-to-face teaching in the clinic, but while we return to the tried-and-tested conventional teaching, we should also build on the progress of virtual teaching methods and technologies, and keep them as part of the educational process, where appropriate, to further enhance the teaching and learning experience.
