Medical education transformation during the COVID-19 pandemic in a national hospital

Abstract

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has generated important transformations in society. In higher education, especially in those institutions and tertiary care centers with training programs for medical specialists, the confinement measures generated significant challenges for the continuity of their internal processes and, particularly, in the teaching-teaching processes, and new strategies to preserve medical education were created.

Objective: To analyze the perception of graduate students about educational transformations based on the organizational changes that were implemented for virtual education during the COVID-19 pandemic in a tertiary care hospital.

Method: Study with a mixed, quantitative and qualitative design, which included 100 medical specialists in training from the National Institute of Cardiology “Ignacio Chávez”. A survey with 151 items was developed, which was applied to the total sample. In addition, 10 in-depth semi-structured interviews with 13 questions were conducted. Qualitative data was analyzed through the MAXQDA version 18 program and quantitative data was analyzed using the R version 3.6.0 program.

Results: A type of radical-adaptive change is shown, which materialized with the emergence of new practices and forms of organization linked to information and communication technologies (ICT) in the teaching-learning processes.

Conclusions: Due to the pandemic, the implementation of strategies linked to the use of ICT allowed the continuity of the training processes in the specialists. In addition, a type of learning will be presented that allows enriching educational processes, both pedagogical and organizational.