COVID-19 changes how UCF medical students are getting experience
Combination of virtual lectures, in-person dissections planned
Holding a scalpel and cutting through human tissue is essential hands-on experience for medical students, but COVID-19 is forcing some changes this year in anatomy labs at UCF College of Medicine and many other medical schools.
Some anatomy labs have gone fully virtual, some are planning on their regular in-person classes and others, like UCF, are doing a combination of virtual lectures and inperson dissections.
“The best way to teach anatomy is hands on,” said Dr. Daniel Topping, associate professor of medicine at UCF, who’s in charge of the anatomy curriculum. “You can teach how to identify structures on an image and see it in a picture, but it’s kind of a big challenge to make that leap to identify that in a body.”
So Topping ’s solution has boiled down to a compromise, which is pending the school’s approval and COVID-19 spread in the community: instead of having 120 students in a class — six students per donor cadaver — there are only going to be 30 students in each class with two students per body. And instead of one fourhour class, there will be two-hour classes Monday through Friday to allow all students to work on the cadavers.
“They wouldn’t have the exact same experience, but they would at least have some experience with dissecting and picking up where their teammates left off,” Topping said. “I guess if you want to look at a silver lining, this would be good for the students to practice a skill in medicine that we call handoff.”
Indiana University, which has one of the largest anatomy departments in the country, is also doing a mix of virtual lectures and inperson labs at its medical school. The school has also reduced the number of students per anatomy class and has shortened the duration of the lab from 16 weeks to nine weeks in case there is another wave of COVID-19 in the fall, said Dr. Jason Organ, associate professor of anatomy and cell biol
ogy at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
While the pandemic has affected all levels of education, some worry that medical students may not get the full experience of medical school because of delays in classes or virtual- only courses. Others say it’s the camaraderie that the students build in school while developing their professional skills that’s been affected.
“I’m not so concerned about their lack of anatomy knowledge … but it’s the stuff that doesn’t get covered in the curriculum per se, and that is team building, teamwork, the ability to develop skills with surgical instruments,” Organ said. “Because we have to get them through their labs much quicker than they normally do, they don’t have a chance to discover things on their own quite as much.”
At UCF, the pandemic not only has changed the anatomy lab experience for first-year medical students, but it has taken away the White Coat ceremony, where students celebrate the beginning of medical school after years of hard work, receive their short white coats and recite the Hippocratic oath.
This year, instead of the ceremony, students received their white coats in their cars.
“You pulled into a parking spot and texted a number and they came out with their masks, waiving and they put the white coat in the car and you then had to drive off for the next student,” first-year UCF medical student Brittany Perry said. “It was definitely different than what usually happens.”
Third- and fourth-year students have also been affected by the pandemic.
That’s when students begin their rotations in the hospitals and learn about different specialties. Because of the pandemic, the rotations were delayed for many as hospitals grappled with providing their staff with personal protective equipment while caring for COVID-19 patients.
Instead of May, many of hospital rotations began in August and their duration has been shortened. Moreover, testing centers closed during the early months of the pandemic, changing the timing of the first board exam that medical students take at the end of their second year.
“We could all adapt to it and the students were amazing but they had a lot thrown at them,” said Dr. Katherine Daly, director of Counseling and Wellness Services at UCF College of Medicine. “This is something they’ve been preparing for since like kindergarten and their worlds got turned upside down.”
Daly said there has been an increase in demand for mental health services since the pandemic started.
“I’m working later into the evening to be able to see students who are back in the hospitals, because that’s stressful for them, too,” she
said. “I wish I had a crystal ball and could say when this pandemic-related stress will deteriorate, but I think this is we’re going to see the impact of this for a while; at least that’s what a lot of the leading scientists are saying.”
The pandemic’s effects don’t stop there.
Another course affected this year is the clinical skills lab, where students meet with patient actors and practice their interviewing and examining skills.
Many of the actors are older adults who are among the high-risk groups for COVID-19 infection, so program directors decided to turn those sessions virtual and in the process teach students how to conduct telemedicine visits.
In mid-October, students will start performing inperson physical exams, but on each other instead of actors.
“We’ve had to get creative in terms of how we maintain the educational objectives while we’re teaching online,” said Dr. Analia Castiglioni, assistant dean for clinical skill and simulation and professor of medicine at UCF. “So from our clinical skills and simulation center we really reinvented ourselves.”
But for her and many others, it ’s the physical presence in medical school that’s missing.
“I think we all miss being in the school and having that hallway chat,” said Castiglioni.
Perry, who’s only a few weeks into her first year of medical school, said that she’s gotten to know most of her classmates via Zoom sessions and lives with three other first-year students. She said she hopes that the in-person anatomy lab was a go for October.
“There’s nothing natural about learning about humans and human medicine virtually,” said Perry. “But the good thing is that in the first year it’s mostly biochemistry and microbiology, so a lot of these subjects are textbook subjects.”
So is there a silver lining? “My take is that we’re going to be putting out a lot more physicians who are capable of rolling with the punches,” said Organ of Indiana University. “I can’t think of a better time to enter medical school than during a pandemic. The idea is that you want to instill the sense of urgency and importance for students. They get it now. They see the importance of medicine in a way that they probably didn’t see it prior [to the pandemic.]”
Perry, a Fulbright Fellow who spent a year in Finland studying maternal health before starting medical school, has similar hopes.
“Hopefully, we’re not at a disadvantage. If anything, I hope it makes us more resilient and we’ll be able to be more empathetic to people and the struggles they go through, because it makes us appreciate life more. I hope that’s what this does for our class,” she said.