A few weeks ago the Medical school took the difficult decision along with the rest of the country, to suspend all clinical placements and on campus teaching for the rest of this academic year. Over the past few weeks the UG Primary Care team have worked at pace to convert all primary care tutorial teaching and clinical experience in local practices to a digital online format.
Dr Nina Dutta and Dr Neepa Thacker have tirelessly worked on this mammoth task and led two teams to create literally in days, full timetables of online learning for the students to work from. The teams have held student webinars from their living rooms and even managed to hold small group zoom tutorials, checking in with the students with their on-going learning and also importantly to check how the students are doing themselves.
The Medical School has also made the difficult decision to suspend all clinical examinations. Of note they held the first of its kind remote open book exit exam for the final year students. This similar format will be rolled out in the next few months for the year 3 and 5 clinical exams. As many of you may have also read, many of our final year students have taken up the opportunity to graduate early, to help serve on the NHS frontline in the next few weeks.
The Undergraduate Primary Care team has been working hard to also set up ICSM-C led by Dr Ravi Parekh and Ms Nadine Engineer, the community arm of the medical school-volunteering programme. We plan to induct and link together a small army of medical students with local GP practices, where the students will be able to support vulnerable patients at home by remotely calling them, delivering medications and following up on their chronic disease management as many if the primary care staff are being diverted to COVID-19 duties. We plan to evaluate the impact of this unique scheme, by looking at the impact on the students, patients and GP practices.
This is an uncertain and stressful time for us all, and as a department we have been keen that we try to continue to maintain some normality with working from home, holding meetings remotely and team wellbeing sessions where possible. The UG Primary care team have been a great source of support to each other and also to myself, as we have very abruptly moved to a very new way of working and teaching our students in the midst of a national crisis.
Thank you to everyone in Undergraduate Primary Care, we are lucky to have each and every one of you.