Assessing Brazilian Medical Student Awareness About Global Surgery: A Survey-Based Study

Global Cardiac Surgery in Brazil: A Call to Action

Global Cardiac Surgery is an innovative initiative with a focus on improving health outcomes and achieving healthcare equity for individuals worldwide affected by cardiac surgical conditions or in need of cardiac surgical care. Considering the existing disparities in access to cardiac surgery and the substantial burden of cardiac conditions amenable to surgical procedures in Brazil, it is imperative to support and scale Global Cardiac Surgery initiatives and leave no Brazilian patient behind. Here, we advocate for national initiatives within this field and highlight opportunities and challenges to support their development.

Social Media in Health Studies: A Systematic Review of Comparative Learning Methods

Learning modifications particularly increased due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which made it necessary to offer distance health education for many months. Social media allows students to have interactive activities such as discussing specific subjects or sharing data with each other, and also to have interactions with their teachers and tutors. So, we aimed to compare the effects of the use of social media on knowledge, skills and perceptions in health students compared to other methods. We performed a systematic review on PubMed, ScienceDirect and Embase about comparative learning methods using social media. The search followed PRISMA guidelines, and the quality assessment of the studies was performed using the Medical Education Research Quality instrument (MERSQI). Eight studies were analyzed including 1014 participants. Mean age ranged from 19.9 to 23.4 years, and 70% were females. About 54.4% of the participants were medical students and 20.9% were dental students. The mean MERSQI was 11.7 ± 2.6. Various subjects were included-anatomy, cultural competences, sterile surgical techniques, radiology, arthrocentesis, medical pathologies and cariology. As far as knowledge evaluation was concerned, we found that the use of social media may have had a positive effect from a short-term point of view but results concerning skills were less consistent across studies. Students usually had a positive perception of the use of social media as a complementary method but not as a complete alternative so it is not excluded that this effect might result from an increase in working time. The impact on patient care should also be assessed in future studies.