Education in academic emergency medicine during the COVID-19 pandemic – our experience from an ongoing crisis
Abstract Background: The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in suspension of the whole teaching program at the Medical University of Vienna until the end of summer semester. Therefore, a substantial waste of learning time threatens. As the responsible department for emergency medicine teaching, we adapted our program to continue with our courses and maintain the learning progress. Our objective was to evaluate the number of conducted courses and to report the used methods.Methods: Teaching was classified in credit hours per week (CHW). One CHW represents 15 academic hours (45 minutes) during one semester. Computations were performed on basis of the official numbers from the prospectus of the university, or - if not available - were calculated with the formula above. Webinars were performed using CISCO Webex Events®, Webex Training® and ZOOM®. We further utilized Moodle® for resuscitation courses.Results: Overall, courses and clerkships equivalent to 80.2 out of 101.4 CHW (79.1%) will be held during the ongoing crisis in summer semester. Courses in winter semester were completed regularly. In the human medicine curriculum, we could perform 73.7 out of 94.9 CHW (77.7%). In the emergency lectures for the dentistry curriculum, we could adapt all courses to webinars (6.5 CHW, 100%). After adjustment for the exact number of students in each class, courses and clerkships equivalent to 78.7% could be conducted.Conclusions: Despite the challenge to be prepared for the treatment of numerous patients during an ongoing pandemic, we could maintain the majority of our teaching responsibilities. Although sufficient skill training cannot be achieved under those circumstances, we could provide the theoretical backgrounds to allow students further continuation in their studies.