Education and training in a pandemic
By Dr Matt Kim, Junior House Officer, Princess Alexandra Hospital, Council of Doctors in Training, Education and Training Portfolio and Dr Pallavi Thite, Paediatric trainee, Queensland Childrens Hospital, Council of Doctors in Training, Education and Training Portfolio
2020 began much like any other year but one day, against the warmth of the Australian summer, the COVID-19 pandemic froze the nation. Today, we see its devastation across the world as we embrace a new norm of social distancing, contract tracing, and lockdowns. Yet throughout the last 18 months of such social upheaval, Queensland has welcomed two cohorts of junior doctors to our profession, eager and apprehensive in beginning a career committed to the health of others in a world that sorely needs them.
The disruptions of 2020 for Doctors in Training across the state were unprecedented. Frozen and reallocated rotations, abandoned teaching opportunities, cancelled conferences, indefinitely postponed examinations, exclusively local and restricted workforce recruitment - the list goes on.
For the vast majority, COVID-19 has been indelibly transformative. However, the journey from medical school to specialties continues onwards for our many current and future colleagues, and with this comes the heightened necessity for ongoing quality education and training of our junior doctors. In recognising such challenges, AMA Queensland and its Council of Doctors in Training (CDT) approached our Hospital and Health Services (HHSs) to shed light on this crucial matter at local, state, and federal level.
Since then, technology has proved instrumental in creating a sustainable and versatile medium to facilitate education. Video conferencing software such as Zoom has safeguarded some fashion of human interaction but more importantly, as Medical Education Units embrace their use, they have ensured an open channel for teaching of junior doctors.
Likewise, virtual conferences are now more prevalent, providing valuable opportunities for the continued dissemination of learning throughout the country. In short, the restrictions posed by the pandemic had spurred innovative and diverse avenues for the delivery of education - a serendipitous movement that CDT is hopeful will persevere.
The post-internship prevocational space, previously neglected by many hospitals, suffered further with the pandemic as residents were assigned months of shift work with variable access to protected teaching opportunities. The CDT is committed to ensuring consistent access and believes workforce shortages from a lack of internal medical graduates, whilst unfortunate, does not preclude from and should not threaten the delivery of education to our junior doctors. Moreover, we advocate for a concerted effort to develop a robust educational program for prevocational doctors beyond internship to bridge the structureless learning gap between the latter and vocational training, in the spirit of that lifelong journey of learning that is medicine.
This year, with the memories of 2020 fresh in our minds, there has been an emphasis on business as usual. The daily tally of cases and morning pandemic updates are now part of the normality that we had all taken for granted during non-COVID-19 days and as the vaccination roll out continues across the state, perhaps there is some hope for life to return to those days.
Similarly, this is a sentiment shared by the coordinators of the Resident Medical Officer (RMO) Campaign, which is well underway at time of writing. With career progression severely impeded during last year’s array of exam cancellations, and some recruitment restricted to locally within individual hospitals, junior doctor recruitment has been all the more important. From our colleagues’ perspectives, the lack of transparency surrounding the recruitment process beyond the campaign for highly sought specialties in the unaccredited registrar space remains an ongoing concern and is one of many points of continued discussions that we have with Queensland Health.
From the CDT perspective, as the Education and Training Portfolio Leads for this year, we commend the ongoing commitment to education by all HHSs across the state. The COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented in its scale and magnitude, exhausting an already burdened healthcare system. Within the latter however, are the numerous junior doctors whose ability to care for their patients and future careers are reliant on learning opportunities during their formative years. As such, we urge healthcare leadership to continue to innovate and prioritise the education of our peers, especially in this time of uncertainty. We hope that 2021 paves the road to recovery and improvement in the training sphere for junior doctors throughout the state and nation.