Transition to online teaching and learning for clerkship activities during COVID-19 in Malaysia

Prior-to the COVID-19 outbreak, undergraduate PharmCare II Clerkship activities consisted of two phases. The first phase requires pharmacy students to clerk infectious disease and endocrine-related cases of patients admitted into wards at a teaching hospital, whilst in the second phase, the students are required to present the clerked cases in front of their group members with a thorough assessment by lecturers at Universiti Sains Malaysia. Due to sudden outbreak of COVID-19, presentations at hospitals and face-to-face learning were no longer feasible;therefore an online methodology was executed. Each student was assigned a real completed case clerked by a previous Master's in Clinical Pharmacy graduate. The students then critically evaluated any pharmaceutical care issues (PCIs) in each of the cases, recorded a video presentation for assessment by the lecturers and discussed each case with other group members in a synchronous online session via web-conferencing software. Copyright © 2020, International Pharmaceutical Federation. All rights reserved.

Fear, Affective Semiosis, and Management of the Pandemic Crisis: Covid-19 as Semiotic Vaccine?

The COVID-19 pandemic represents an extraordinary challenge to clinicians, health care institutions and policymakers. The paper outlines a psychoanalytically grounded semiotic-cultural psychological interpretation of such a scenario. First, we underline how the actual emotional reaction (mainly of fear) of our society is a marker of how the mind functions in conditions of affective activation related to heightened uncertainty: it produces global, homogenizing and generalizing embodied interpretations of reality, at the cost of more fine-grained and differentiated analytical thought. Such a process, called affective semiosis, represents an adaptive response to the emergency in the short-term. Second, we argue that this adaptive value provided by affective semiosis will be reduced when we have to deal with the process of managing the transition to the post-crisis and the governance of the medium and longterm impact of the crisis. Third, we suggest that, in order to manage the pandemic crisis on a longer temporal frame, affective semiosis has to be integrated with less generalized and more domain-specific ways of interpreting reality. To this end, semiotic capital (i.e., culturally-mediated symbolic resources) should be promoted in order to enable people to interiorize the supra-individual and collective dimension of life. Accordingly, COVID-19 is proposed as a semiotic vaccine, a disruption in our everyday life routines which has the potential of opening the way to a semiotic reappropriation of the collective dimensions of our experience.