Transformation in the Medical Education System During and Post Covid-19

Abstract

The medical education system in India was anticipated to undergo a paradigm shift from a traditional teacher centric model to a competency based or learner centric one focused on skill acquisition as recommended and implemented by various global graduate medical education systems in other countries in the year 2019.This coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic which made it necessary to impose lock down in order to follow social distancing and curb down the spread of the disease. This led to shifting of education to an online mode predominantly. We reviewed various research studies from around the world to gather data on perception of students and faculty in medical colleges towards this online or distance education. There are various advantages of online education like flexibility, allowing learners to revisit topics, availability of repository of information etc and posing minimal risk to students in the pandemic which are worth appreciating, however the students and faculty realise that for learning medicine interaction with patients is inevitable. This issue can be addressed through simulation to a certain extent but it definitely doesn't give the confidence to students to face the real world. After the relaxation in pandemic restrictions, now that the students have resumed offline classes, we as educators must think and learn from our experiences to design our teaching methodology in such a way that it reaps maximum benefits of both online and offline education