Medicine Students' Opinions Post-COVID-19 Regarding Online Learning in Association with Their Preferences as Internet Consumers

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted e-learning as a critical component that ensured the continuity of students' education processes. In this regard, many research groups aim to provide new scientific data about the efficiency and benefits of e-learning for healthcare students. Our study aims to evaluate the attraction of e-learning among medical and dental Romanian students, in association with their preferences as internet and computer consumers. The study enrolled 551 students in medicine from four Romanian Universities of Medicine and Pharmacy, located in major cities (Iași - 64.6%, Craiova - 19.6%, Timișoara - 14.5% and Cluj Napoca - 1.3%), mostly females (76.2%), from the first and second years of study (63.7%) or the fourth to sixth years of study (23.3%), aged 18-20 years (53.9%). To investigate their opinions about the efficiency of e-learning, we used an anonymous questionnaire with 31 items regarding advantages (17 items) and possible drawbacks (14 items). The students in medicine had favourable opinions about online learning because these tools are more comfortable (75.2%) and more flexible (60.1%). The main reasons for disagreement were the lack of direct communication and human interaction with teachers (53.2%), limitations due to the particularities of some disciplines that cannot be easily transferred to the online environment (46.4%), and the lack of proper motivation (32.5%). Older students, who liked to use multimedia resources in the learning process and used the internet mainly for information purposes or domestic facilities, had the highest scores for favourable opinions about online learning. The younger students, who did not prefer using multimedia resources in the learning process, also had the highest scores for disagreement regarding online learning. There were no statistically significant differences between genders.

The goldmine of patient satisfaction-interaction and communication in the context of infectious diseases.

This study aimed to investigate the patient satisfaction level in terms of communication and interaction with the physicians from a Romanian Infectious Disease hospital. The objectives of the study were related to the identification of the general level of satisfaction of the patients, the evaluation of the physicians' interaction type with their physicians, by using specific behavioral variables, such as respect and attention, as well as to determine the physician-patient communication quality. The data were collected with a self-administered questionnaire and were analyzed using IBM SPSS version 25. The sample comprised 82 patients who were hospitalized in the Department of Infectious Diseases. The quantitative variables were evaluated with the Shapiro-Wilk test and were described by the means and standard deviations, while the qualitative data were described by using the absolute values and percentages. The vast majority of patients were aged between 18-28 years old, were mostly females from urban areas, and 41.5% had university degrees. The outcomes of the study revealed that the general satisfaction of the patients, from a communication perspective, was reflected in the perceived and provided quality of information about the treatment. Although the vast majority of patients highly appreciated the interaction and the communication with their physicians, some individuals felt the need to read more information about their disease, especially from online sources, and they would have preferred their physicians to recommend trustful websites or health care platforms.

Trick or treat: Social Media's dissemination power of ophthalmologic information in the pandemic context.

Social Media in the COVID-19 pandemic context has become a real dissemination medium of ophthalmology information for both physicians and health care consumers. This trend of sharing information has revealed new and innovative interventions in Ophthalmology such as teleophthalmology on Social Media by providing synchronous and asynchronous consultations, education, and prevention solutions as well as scientific research findings. This paper is a review of the current challenges and limitations faced by ophthalmologists and health care consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

10-Months Study Regarding the COVID-19 Spreading in Romanian Counties.

The paper analyzes the evolution of COVID-19 cases in Romanian counties over a period of 10 months, to highlight possible similarities that may contribute to a better understanding of the spreading pattern. The study uses the numbers of active cases for each county in Romania, as well as Bucharest and the whole country, reported daily by the Romanian Ministry of Health (https://datelazi.ro) between April 2nd, 2020 and January 25th, 2021. We compared the disease's evolution in Suceava county (the first outbreak of spread) with other counties in Romania in order to highlight the gaps between them. We calculated the cross-correlations between counties, interpreted as time series. The recorded lags varied between 1-15 days, the most counties having a lag of 6-7 days compared with Suceava. Therefore, on long term there are no important discrepancies between the regions in Romania regarding the evolution of the disease, which shows that the intervention efforts of the medical staff were uniform in efficiency. The existence of a lag of only one day between Suceava and the whole country shows that on long term, even in this county the situation is not very discrepant, belonging to the general evolution.