COVID Impact on Healthcare Education

 

Often times when we think of the impact of COVID, we think about how it is affecting our lives in the very moment and not necessarily what it will mean in the context of the future of our careers. I’ve seen funny videos on Tik Tok of medical students making a joke of their “COVID” education experiences by googling simple diagnoses and definitions because for the past 2 years they’ve had a lot of online learning which impacted the more practical side of their education. One day when they’re practicing they might not know as much material as they’re expected to know because their curriculum wasn’t as strict as it typically is in person. Thinking back to when the pandemic first started in 2020 and how healthcare wasn’t prepared for a pandemic to completely alter the curriculum, faculty and preceptors were expected to switch everything to a virtual platform so quickly, leaving doctorate students to either try to learn their rotation virtually or to not have their rotation at all for a short time. There was one shadowing experience I had under a P4 student with Dr. Vandenberg my P1 year where I got to attend Michigan Medicine Inpatient psychiatric rounds, and then hop on another zoom call to meet with just Dr. Vandenberg, her PGY2, and the P4 to discuss dementia. From that experience, I had a hard time getting a grasp of what it was really like to be in a hospital and experience rounds for what they were – I can only imagine how the P4 felt. For those 2 years, many exams and quizzes were open note due to the online format, which I could imagine students spent more time refining their notes to make it easy to look up content rather than actually knowing the content for what it is and being able to recall it from memory. This makes me concerned for what healthcare will look like in the coming years when those years of students begin to play a role in decision making for patients. Being online hasn’t been completely bad as there are definitely students who learn better in an environment where they can learn at their own pace, it allowed the opportunity for medical programs to confine their curriculum to be more efficient where things that could be in person were and things that didn’t weren’t (such as SPIs), and as far as extracurricular programming goes it allowed for more healthcare professionals to be involved in various events held outside of the curriculum. However, I’m genuinely curious to see what impact this will make on all of us as practicing healthcare professionals. Furthermore, I’m curious to hear what all of you think as well!