ABSTRACT
To combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Singapore has adopted a rigorous screening approach that involves aggressive contact tracing, rapid isolation of confirmed or suspect cases, and immediate ring-fencing of emerging local clusters and hotspots. Our screening centre team has been involved in running Singapore's designated screening centre since the end of January this year. With a well-defined blueprint and substantial pre-outbreak preparatory work, initial operations at our screening centre commenced within a day on activation and full operational status was attained in 3 days. As of 8 April 2020, the screening centre had screened more than 14,000 patients. We have adopted a "whole-of-hospital" approach, enlisting the help from other departments and subspecialties to augment manpower. Meticulous infrastructure planning to facilitate patient flow and strict measures to prevent nosocomial transmission and occupational exposure were instituted to safeguard both the staff and patients. This paper aims to describe our key takeaways in the course of operations and discuss the challenges encountered.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Dry Eye Syndromes , Child , Dry Eye Syndromes/diagnosis , Dry Eye Syndromes/epidemiology , Humans , Pandemics , SARS-CoV-2 , Screen Time , Surveys and QuestionnairesABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted medical education and forced medical schools to shift to remote teaching. However, in many institutions, this shift was complicated by the lack of previous experience and resources as well as the decreased educational time and effort due to increased clinical load. In April 2020, the International Emergency Medicine (iEM) Education Project embarked upon a social responsibility initiative to ease and facilitate this transition for emergency medicine clerkships. A 4-week open online emergency medicine core content course for medical students covering 11 lessons and 37 topics was created. This course contains a total of 25 hours of content, 66 chapters curated from the free iEM Education Project 2018 eBook and Society of Academic Emergency Medicine curriculum website and 131 videos granted freely by the commercial medical education resources provider, Lecturio. In the first 24 hours, the website was visited 3127 times from 57 countries in 6 continents. While online teaching is not a substitute for in-person clinical teaching, such initiatives can provide resources to clinical teachers who are overwhelmed with clinical duties and an opportunity for medical students from low-resource settings to continue their training safely during the pandemic.