Finding Focus in Crisis: Resident-Driven Graduate Medical Education at a Military Training Facility during the COVID-19 Pandemic

摘要

Pandemics offer a multitude of challenges to healthcare providers and medical institutions, particularly within military medicine. In addition to administering world-class patient care and maintaining the overall health and safety of the hospital staff, military training facilities (MTFs) affiliated with graduate medical education (GME) face particular challenges. Preservation of adequate trainee education remains difficult when resources are limited, elective surgeries and evaluations are postponed, and social distancing requirements keep trainee-staff interactions minimized. Nevertheless, maintenance of GME at MTFs is of utmost importance in terms of medical and operational readiness. There is limited structural guidance with regards to sustaining quality GME during these unique times. The presence of such difficulty offers opportunity for the discovery of innovative approaches to resident education, and limited research on GME has been performed during periods of required social distancing. As such, the authors propose a novel and structured approach to the persistence of not only adequate, but perhaps improved strategies to provide GME while mitigating exposure risks and maintaining the health and safety of residents and attending educators.