(Press-News.org) When the COVID-19 pandemic forced medical students out of classrooms and clinical rotations this time last year, the state of Georgia's only public medical school had to quickly rethink its traditional curriculum.
Faculty and staff at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University were able to quickly adapt and provide an online platform for learning about the pandemic and initiating student-led service projects to aid frontline workers and help educate the public, MCG faculty and students write in a review article in the journal Medical Science Educator.
The University System of Georgia suspended in-classroom learning in mid-March, so faculty at MCG shifted first- and second-year in person classes to online. Lectures were replaced with recorded materials and other in-person activities like small groups, clinical skills training and anatomy labs were either suspended or transitioned online.
"Our faculty were able to make that transition as smooth as possible by constantly listening to students' feedback - asking what worked and what didn't," says second-year student Amanda Delgado, one of the article's co-authors.
Later in March, the Association of American Medical Colleges called for a "pause" in patient contact and clinical training for third- and fourth-year medical students across the country. The medical school's administration knew that "steps to ensure an enriching alternative to clinical education" had to be taken, the students write.
The medical school's solution? Stand up a novel online Pandemic Medicine Elective -- one it already had a model for.
An existing summer program, Areas of Concentration, had been traditionally offered to rising second-year students as a four-week elective that covered topics like ethics, leadership, global and public health, health policy and artificial intelligence and machine learning. Faculty with extensive knowledge in each field facilitated lectures on each topic.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, MCG's academic administration was able to restructure that program to create the new elective. It consisted of four weeks of instruction -- two hours of lectures, four days a week, and one day dedicated to experiential learning and service. Teams of physicians and educators from across the medical school and guest lecturers from other colleges and universities collaborated to educate students on topics ranging from the basic science of SARS-CoV-2 to the challenges it created for health care and the public sector, from how to deliver health care in a crisis to professional and personal responsibility.
The second version of the elective, launched in mid-May, was offered to rising second-year students, as well as a limited number of students and oral and maxillofacial surgery residents from the Dental College of Georgia and some students from The Graduate School. "With summer research programs cancelled, students were eager to engage with faculty and content experts on relevant health topics," the students write.
The elective also offered rich experiences like the listening to interviews with physicians battling the pandemic in China and Germany and participating in a live question and answer session with a physician who compared her experience working in Guinea during the Ebola crisis to that of fighting COVID-19 in New York City.
As the pandemic raged on through the summer, a third iteration -- called a "selective" because it was offered to a select group of students whose clinical rotations were being delayed -- was launched in late June and focused on preparing students for what the clinical environment would look like when they returned to clinical activities during the pandemic. "While (it) included topics from previous iterations of the elective, it focused more heavily on the impact of the pandemic on providers and their delivery of care," says MCG infectious disease physician Dr. Rodger MacArthur, the article's senior author and the group's faculty advisor.
A common thread among each version of the elective was student-led service learning projects. Some of those included developing a website to publish local COVID-19 news and resources, aiding frontline workers by purchasing and delivering N95 masks, gloves and face shields, raising $15,000 to purchase personal protective equipment and collaborating with musicians to provide them comfort. At the medical school's regional campuses across the state, students worked with public health departments to help with contact tracing and work in their call centers.
By the completion of the elective, a total of 6,198 service hours had been logged by MCG students.
"So many people rose to the occasion and everyone worked together to help us continue our education and help our communities at the same time," says second-year student Joseph Elengickal, the article's corresponding author.
Next steps include conducting surveys and focus groups on students' experiences during the elective with an eye toward improving students' other educational experiences.
INFORMATION:
Other authors were second-year MCG students Shefali Jain, Elena Diller, Catherine Valli, Kesar Dhillon, Hee Lee and Rohitha Baskar.
Read the full article.
Prior infection with COVID-19 protects most people against reinfection, with 0.65% of patients returning a positive PCR test twice during Denmark's first and second waves, compared with 3.27% of people who tested positive after initially being negative.
People over the age of 65 are at greater risk of catching COVID-19 again, with only 47% protection against repeat infection compared with 80% for younger people.
Protection against reinfection remained stable for more than six months.
The findings underline that measures to protect the elderly - including social distancing and vaccinations are essential even if people have already been diagnosed with COVID-19.
The analysis focused on the original COVID-19 strain and made no assessment ...
When it comes to adapting to new situations, goats are a step ahead. Compared to sheep, they can more quickly adapt to changing environmental conditions. These are the findings of a new study by researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) which were published in Royal Society Open Science. The study investigated how well the animals were able to navigate around obstacles to reach food.
Sheep and goats have many things in common: They are closely related genetically, roughly the same size, have similar social structures, and have both been domesticated by humans over approximately the same amount of time. They do, however, differ greatly when it comes to their foraging strategies. "While sheep ...
As their name suggests, by-the-wind sailor jellyfish know how to catch a breeze. Using a stiff, translucent sail propped an inch above the surface of the ocean, these teacup-sized organisms skim along the water dangling a fringe of delicate purple tentacles just below the surface to capture zooplankton and larval fish as they travel.
At the mercy of the wind, these jellies can wash ashore and strand -- sometimes numbering in the trillions -- on beaches around the world, including up and down the U.S. West Coast. And while these mass stranding events are hard to miss, very little actually is known about how or why they happen.
Now, thanks to 20 years of observations from thousands of citizen scientists, ...
When it comes to the use of driverless vehicles, an individual's support for their adoption hinges on how safe they are, rather than their economic impact or privacy concerns stemming from the data they might collect, a Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) study of 1,006 Singaporeans has found.
The NTU Singapore study led by the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information exposed its participants to positive and negative blog posts about driverless vehicles and their safety, their impact on jobs and the economy, ...
The collaborative work is published online in the journal Communications Biology on March 8th, 2021.
The power of photosynthesis
Photosynthesis represents the only biological process, which converts the energy of sunlight into chemically stored energy. On molecular level, the photosynthetic key enzymes called photosystems are responsible for this conversion process. Photosystem I (PSI), one of the two photosystems, is a large membrane protein complex that can be present in different forms - as monomers, dimers, trimers or even tetramers.
New isolation technique helps revealing ...
An international team of scholars studied how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Europeans' stress levels and their trust in their national governments and the healthcare systems. They found that respondents were most stressed by the state of the national economy, and only after that, by the risk of catching COVID-19 and possibly being hospitalized. The results of the study were published in Royal Society Open Science.
The authors of the study represent over 50 universities. Among them is Dmitrii Dubrov, Junior Research Fellow at the HSE Center for Sociocultural Research, who developed and organized the global survey, COVIDiSTRESS. The researchers studied the psychological ...
An international study led by the University Complutense of Madrid (UCM) proposed new computational image processing methods that improve the analysis and three-dimensional reconstruction of biological macromolecules.
Currently, determining the composition (i.e., the sequence of amino acids) of macromolecules such as proteins is relatively simple; however, determining the shape in which they are ordered in a three-dimensional structure is not. The new methodology, published in Nature Communications, improves the visualization of the 3D reconstructions obtained through cryogenic electron microscopy, as well as their quality.
"This study helps us broaden our understanding of proteins ...
Every year 600-900 million tons of carbon flow through rivers to the ocean either as particles or in dissolved form. Researchers have known for a long time that this does not represent the total amount of carbon that gets transported from the land to the ocean. But the remaining contributors mostly from coastal ecosystems, such as carbon-rich mangrove forests, and from groundwater discharge into the ocean have been notoriously difficult to measure.
A new study published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles and spearheaded by Dr. Eun Young Kwon, project leader at the IBS Center for Climate Physics South Korea provides new estimates of this elusive component of the global carbon cycle. The study makes use of the existence of two stable carbon isotopes, 12C and 13C, with the latter ...
Statisticians have calculated the probability of ships of different Polar Ship Categories becoming beset in ice along the Northern Sea Route. Their data will help assess the risks of maritime traffic in the Arctic.
The results of the new study, published recently in the Cold Regions Science and Technology journal, will support safer maritime transport planning and the prevention of oil spills. The results will also benefit authorities that regulate maritime traffic by providing a foundation for statutes and legislation. A comprehensive approach to computing helps shipping companies plan transport routes.
Tankers more common on the Northern Sea Route
The Northern Sea Route is attracting more tankers and cargo ships travelling from Russia and ...
Powerful and squat stegosaurs are now one of the most recognisable dinosaurs: they are easily identified by the spines on the tail and the bony plates on the back - osteoderms. The representatives of this group lived about 165-125 million years ago, during the Jurassic and early Cretaceous periods. They were five to seven metres long and had a disproportionately small head. Their teeth were therefore quite small - about a centimetre in height and about the same in width.
Palaeontologists from St Petersburg University worked together with colleagues from: the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences; the ...
