Abstract
Abstract
Background
The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way we work, spend, live, and learn. The impact was felt in the health sector where hospitals cancelled elective surgery, put on hold outpatient services, and implemented new social distancing procedures and telehealth systems, to enable hospitals to increase bed capacity. For medical students, these factors meant significant disruption to their clinical placements, remote delivery of their education, cessation of international and interstate placements, complicated by significant travel restrictions and border closures. There were concerns that final year students might be unable to graduate that year due to this lack of clinical exposure.
Innovation
As a result of this disruption in late March 2020 we developed an innovative six week ‘COVID-19 e-lective’ rotation, consisting of online modules, virtual clinical tutorials and a COVID project totalling the equivalent of two hundred hours of work.
Results
An evaluation was undertaken that found it to be remarkably successful in meeting the students’ learning needs and alleviating concerns about disrupted placements. It was also conducted during 2021 for all Year 4 students to help expand clinical placement opportunities.
Outcomes
This paper describes the e-lective, its innovations, its challenges, and its evaluation findings, for others to learn from.
Publisher
Research Square Platform LLC
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