[Special Feature: The COVID-19 Crisis and the University] Infection Prevention Guidelines by Medical Students / Toshiaki Monkawa

2020/08/06

Medical education was also significantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In medical education, clinical clerkships where students examine patients are important training sessions not only for understanding diseases and acquiring clinical skills, but also for cultivating physician professionalism. In March 2020, as community transmission of COVID-19 spread, the Keio University School of Medicine decided to suspend clinical clerkships.

As the person responsible for education at the School of Medicine, I was in a position to make various decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic and struggled with how to conduct clinical clerkships. In order to protect the clinical clerkship—an essential educational setting for becoming a future doctor—I felt that students should also consider what they could do, and I asked several students to think about what they should do to protect their place of learning.

A group of volunteers from the 5th and 6th year classes gathered, believing they should create their own infection prevention guidelines and act accordingly. After reading through a vast amount of literature and guidelines, they completed the "COVID-19 Infection Prevention Guidelines for Medical Students" in just about two weeks. The guidelines consist of "Summary of Infection Prevention Measures for Medical Students," "Pathogens and Clinical Presentation," "Basic Principles for COVID-19 Infection Prevention and Clinical Clerkship Management," "Out-of-Hospital COVID-19 Prevention Measures," and "Pre-Clerkship COVID-19 Prevention Checklist." The content was also supervised by Dr. Shunsuke Uno of the Center for Infectious Disease and Infection Control. These infection prevention guidelines were published on medstudent.jp so that medical students at other universities could also use them.

Students at the Keio University School of Medicine read these infection prevention guidelines, conducted peer-to-peer exams to confirm their understanding, and prepared for the resumption of clinical clerkships. Unfortunately, due to the state of emergency, clinical clerkships were moved online. As of the time of writing, clinical clerkships at the hospital are scheduled to resume in September.

Since these infection prevention guidelines are useful not only for medical students but also for nursing, pharmacy, and other healthcare students, they were revised at the end of May to incorporate the latest findings. I believe these infection prevention guidelines were a wonderful project for Keio students, where they thought of the guidelines themselves and acted based upon them.