MEDICAL SCHOOL EVALUATION & GRADUATION
Medical Student Education in the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Show Must Go On, Safely By Deborah Conway, MD
A tsunami warning system detects an event far away and sends alert signals to those who may be affected so they can respond, prepare and MOVE! In February and early March of 2020, the medical education world began to detect tremors of how the seismic event of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic would impact our domain. The disease was in the news, of course, having reached U.S. shores. San Antonio received quarantined cruise ship passengers. National medical education meetings scheduled for March began to get cancelled preemptively: the first wake-up call to many faculty that this was a different type of crisis. The alarm bells were sounding, and we didn’t know how big the wave was or when it would hit. How far and how fast did we need to run to keep our students safe while minimizing interruptions to their tightly scheduled four-year curriculum? What critical milestones in the life of a developing physician would we have to “leave behind” as we rapidly moved everyone to safety? In the early days of March 2020, we concluded one first-year medical student course under normal circumstances and sent the students on their scheduled one-week Spring Break. Our second-year students were elbowdeep in United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step 1 preparation, with individual scheduled test dates looming. Our third-year students were rotating through core clerkships with our main hospital partners, as well as community practices. Our fourth-year students were eagerly awaiting residency Match Day and graduation activities. At this point, however, the full measure of the infec12
SAN ANTONIO MEDICINE • June 2021
tious threat, the critical shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and the urgent need to “flatten the curve” became apparent. The wave was on the horizon. In the second and third weeks of March, the tsunami hit. During the week the students were on Spring Break, we converted our first-year curriculum, including many team-based, collaborative learning activities, entirely online. Third-party testing centers, where USMLE exams are administered, had closed their doors and cancelled test dates. We pulled clerkship students from clinical environments based on national organization recommendations as well as health system partners scrambling to care for patients in new ways while protecting their workforce. Perhaps most painfully of all, we held a vir-
tual Match Day celebration and committed to a virtual graduation event. No one – staff, faculty, leadership, campus and clinical partners – wavered or flinched during these chaotic days and weeks. Our focus remained on the well-being, safety and ongoing education of our students. By April 2020, conditions had stabilized locally to an extent that allowed us to return our clerkship students to their rotations by the end of that month, and our students were eager to resume their role in patient care and clinical development. Established, strong partnerships between our undergraduate medical education team, clinical departments and hospital affiliates were key to this rapid resumption of clinical activity by our students. To do this safely required additional
