[Experience of teaching and training for medical students at gastrointestinal surgery department under COVID-19 epidemic situation]

The impact of COVID-19 on medical students

Objective

The outbreak of COVID-19 has disrupted social order and placed a heavy burden on the healthcare system. The pandemic also has an unprecedented impact on medical students.

Methods

We searched PubMed for articles related to COVID-19 and medical students from January 2020 to December 2022. A total of 5358 studies were retrieved and after screening, 176 studies were finally included in this review.

Results

The impact of COVID-19 on medical students is widespread and profound. First reflected in the transformation of educational models. In the early days, education model quickly shifted from offline to online. In terms of clinical exposure, most students have been suspended from internships, while in some areas with staff shortages they have the opportunity to continue clinical work. Scientific research of medical students is also difficult to carry out due to COVID-19. The epidemic has also seriously damaged students' mental health, and this impact won't simply disappear with the improvement of the epidemic situation. The career intentions of medical students may also become firmer or change due to COVID-19. International medical electives have also been negatively affected by COVID-19 due to travel restriction. Even in the postpandemic era, with the gradual resumption of work, production and school, medical students are still affected in some ways by COVID-19.

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on both the education of medical students and their personal development. Through COVID-19, we should reflect on what models of medical education should be developed in the future. Based on the experiences learned from COVID-19, we believe that a more flexible blended education model may be the most promising.

Gauging the effects of COVID-related changes to the medical student surgical clerkship experience: a mixed-methods study

Purpose

This study sought to understand the medical student experience on the restructured surgical clerkship during the COVID-era to provide guidance for future scenarios affecting student participation in clinical activities.

Methods

Medical students completing an anonymous 70-question survey at the conclusion of their surgical clerkship from June 2019 to October 2020 were divided into 2 cohorts: students completing their clerkship prior to March 2020 and after June 2020. Quantitative assessment was performed to evaluate the clerkship performance and perceptions. Resulting findings were used to construct an interview guide and conduct semi-structured interviews.

Results

Fifty-nine medical students rotated through the surgical clerkship prior to COVID and 23 during the COVID-era. No differences in perception of the surgical clerkship, participation in essential activities, or shelf examination scores were found. Students completing their clerkship during the COVID-era reported a lower perception of interaction and professional relationships with attending and resident surgeons (p = 0.03). Qualitatively, students completing their clerkship during the COVID-era struggled to balance clinical experiences with personal wellness and noted that building relationships with faculty was substantially more difficult.

Conclusions

There does not appear to be a difference in the level of participation in essential clerkship activities nor a diminished perception of learning between students completing their surgical clerkship before or during the pandemic. However, there does appear to be a difference in the relationships formed between students and attending surgeons. Altered didactic structures and apprenticeship-type rotations may help mitigate such effects.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s44186-022-00015-2.

Medical Morphology Training Using the Xuexi Tong Platform During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Development and Validation of a Web-Based Teaching Approach

Background

Histology and Embryology and Pathology are two important basic medical morphology courses for studying human histological structures under healthy and pathological conditions, respectively. There is a natural succession between the two courses. At the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly swept the world. During this unusual period, to ensure that medical students would understand and master basic medical knowledge and to lay a solid foundation for future medical bridge courses and professional courses, a web-based medical morphology teaching team, mainly including teachers of courses in Histology and Embryology and Pathology, was established.

Objective

This study aimed to explore a new teaching mode of Histology and Embryology and Pathology courses during the COVID-19 pandemic and to illustrate its feasibility and acceptability.

Methods

From March to July 2020, our team selected clinical medicine undergraduate students who started their studies in 2018 and 2019 as recipients of web-based teaching. Meanwhile, nursing undergraduate students who started their studies in 2019 and 2020 were selected for traditional offline teaching as the control group. For the web-based teaching, our team used the Xuexi Tong platform as the major platform to realize a new “seven-in-one” teaching method (ie, videos, materials, chapter tests, interactions, homework, live broadcasts, and case analysis/discussion). This new teaching mode involved diverse web-based teaching methods and contents, including flipped classroom, screen-to-screen experimental teaching, a drawing competition, and a writing activity on the theme of “What I Know About COVID-19.” When the teaching was about to end, a questionnaire was administered to obtain feedback regarding the teaching performance. In the meantime, the final written pathology examination results of the web-based teaching and traditional offline teaching groups were compared to examine the mastery of knowledge of the students.

Results

Using the Xuexi Tong platform as the major platform to conduct “seven-in-one” teaching is feasible and acceptable. With regard to the teaching performance of this new web-based teaching mode, students demonstrated a high degree of satisfaction, and the questionnaire showed that 71.3% or more of the students in different groups reported a greater degree of satisfaction or being very satisfied. In fact, more students achieved high scores (90-100) in the web-based learning group than in the offline learning control group (P=.02). Especially, the number of students with objective scores >60 in the web-based learning group was greater than that in the offline learning control group (P=.045).

Conclusions

This study showed that the web-based teaching mode was not inferior to the traditional offline teaching mode for medical morphology courses, proving the feasibility and acceptability of web-based teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings lay a solid theoretical foundation for follow-up studies of medical students.