ABSTRACT
Background: The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic resulted in redeployment of non-critical care-trained providers to intensive care units across the world. Concurrently, traditional venues for delivery of medical education faced major disruptions. The need for a virtual forum to fill knowledge gaps for healthcare workers caring for patients with coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was apparent in the early stages of the pandemic. Objective: The weekly, open-access COVID-19 Critical Care Training Forum (CCCTF) organized by the American Thoracic Society (ATS) provided a global audience access to timely content relevant to their learning needs. The goals of the forum were threefold: to aid healthcare providers in assessment and treatment of patients with COVID-19, to reduce provider anxiety, and to disseminate best practices. Methods: The first 13 ATS CCCTF sessions streamed live from April to July 2020. Structured debriefs followed each session and participant feedback was evaluated in planning of subsequent sessions. A second set of 14 sessions streamed from August to November 2020. Content experts were recruited from academic institutions across the United States. Results: As of July 2020, the ATS CCCTF had 2,494 live participants and 7,687 downloads for a total of 10,181 views. The majority of participants had both completed training (58.6%) and trained in critical care (53.8%). Physicians made up a majority (82.2%) of the audience that spanned the globe (61% were international attendees). Conclusion: We describe the rapid and successful implementation of an open-access medical education forum to address training and knowledge gaps among healthcare personnel caring for patients with COVID-19.
ABSTRACT
The University of Maryland School of Medicine embarked on our first major curriculum revision since 1994 with a plan to implement this Renaissance Curriculum in August 2020. However, in the Spring of 2020, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic disrupted clinical care and medical education on a large scale requiring expeditious modifications to our Renaissance Curriculum as well as our traditional Legacy Curriculum in order to meet our goal of educating the next-generation of physicians. The rippling effects of the COVID-19 pandemic led to major changes in the delivery of the pre-clerkship curriculum, the way we assessed and evaluated students, entry into the clinical environment, length of clinical rotations, and orientation for our new medical students. We relied on "new" technology, digital medical resources, and the creativity of our educators to ensure that our learners continue to acquire the skills necessary to become skilled clinicians in these unprecedented times.
ABSTRACT
Patients infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus can present with a wide variety of symptoms including being entirely asymptomatic. Despite having no or minimal symptoms, some patients may have markedly reduced pulse oximetry readings. This has been referred to as "silent" or "apathetic" hypoxia (Ottestad et al., 2020 [1]). We present a case of a 72-year-old male with COVID-19 syndrome who presented to the emergency department with minimal symptoms but low peripheral oxygen saturation readings. The patient deteriorated over the following days and eventually died as a result of overwhelming multi-organ system failure. This case highlights the utility of peripheral oxygen measurements in the evaluation of patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection. Self-monitoring of pulse oximetry by patients discharged from the emergency department is a potential way to identify patients needing to return for further evaluation.