RAMPVIS: Answering the challenges of building visualisation capabilities for large-scale emergency responses.

The effort for combating the COVID-19 pandemic around the world has resulted in a huge amount of data, e.g., from testing, contact tracing, modelling, treatment, vaccine trials, and more. In addition to numerous challenges in epidemiology, healthcare, biosciences, and social sciences, there has been an urgent need to develop and provide visualisation and visual analytics (VIS) capacities to support emergency responses under difficult operational conditions. In this paper, we report the experience of a group of VIS volunteers who have been working in a large research and development consortium and providing VIS support to various observational, analytical, model-developmental, and disseminative tasks. In particular, we describe our approaches to the challenges that we have encountered in requirements analysis, data acquisition, visual design, software design, system development, team organisation, and resource planning. By reflecting on our experience, we propose a set of recommendations as the first step towards a methodology for developing and providing rapid VIS capacities to support emergency responses.

‘Bedside’ teaching from home – using remote working technology to maximise undergraduate clinical exposure in the COVID-19 pandemic

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a review of risks versus benefits of face-to-face (F2F) clinical contact for medical students, patients and families. Social distancing reduced teaching-group sizes, universities advised against students seeing higher-risk patients and self-isolating students missed clinical time. In parallel, remote consultations became an accepted part of medical practice. We designed and introduced remote bedside teaching sessions in paediatrics.ObjectivesA pilot project to test whether ward-based bedside teaching sessions run remotely via Microsoft Teams ™ were:Educationally useful for studentsAcceptable to patients and familiesPractical for education facultyInformation governance (IG) secureMethodsTwo 75-minute sessions for seven and eight fourth-year medical students respectively were delivered remotely, with two Paediatric Education Fellows at the patients’ bedside, and a third Fellow remotely.Each session included two paediatric inpatients. Selection criteria:Clinical stabilityA cubicleClinical signs visible via webcamCondition precluding F2F students (e.g., awaiting SARS-CoV2 results)Families provided written consentStudents on their fourth-year paediatric attachment were invited to partake voluntarily and all agreed. Students completed a confidentiality agreement. Approval was provided by the University, hospital management and Trust IG department.Patient and parent acceptability, and educational utility for students was assessed via questionnaire. A faculty focus-group met after each session.A large amount of quantitative and qualitative feedback data was collected.ResultsParent feedback: (n=3, 1 lost to follow-up) All parents stated they felt adequately informed about what the session involved, they and their child felt comfortable, and they would be willing to participate again. Parents commented positively about the reduction in infection risk, and used the analogy of online school to explain the format to their children.Student feedback: (n=13, 2 lost to follow-up)Twelve of the total thirteen students felt able to participate actively. Ten students reported the sessions improved their approach to history-taking, and twelve their approach to differentials, investigations and management. Seven reported the sessions improved their approach to clinical interactions. Three reported their structuring of clinical examination improved, potentially reflecting that most sessions were history-taking focused. Only one student reported technical issues significant enough to affect learning. Despite positive feedback on remote, students prefer F2F, as expected.Themes from qualitative student feedback included:Useful when self-isolatingMore students learn from one ‘interesting’ patientExposure to patients not allowed to see F2FFaculty experience: No IG concerns identified during/after sessions, reflecting extensive pre-planning. All patients and families invited agreed to partake including an acutely unwell teenager. Sessions required considerable investment of time on the part of facilitators.ConclusionsWe present an innovative approach to overcome COVID-19 limitations to medical education. This work demonstrates that bedside paediatric clinical teaching can be successfully delivered remotely to medical students. Our results highlight educational benefit for students, acceptability to patients and families, and that IG requirements are met. It is expected that student feedback on remote learning of clinical skills will improve as facilitators gain more experience and explore different session emphases. A training package for facilitators is now planned.