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Letter to the Editor “Changes to Neurosurgery Resident Education Since Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic”

2020; Elsevier BV; Volume: 139; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.wneu.2020.05.139

1878-8769

Zach Pennington, Daniel Lubelski, Adham M. Khalafallah, Jeff Ehresman, Daniel M. Sciubba, Timothy F. Witham, Judy Huang,

Diversity and Career in Medicine

W ith the onset of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and the resultant cancellation of elective surgical cases nationwide, 1 there have been significant changes to how neurosurgery is taught and practiced. The dramatic decrease in operative cases has significantly affected the training of neurosurgical residents, who depend on elective surgical volume to hone their clinical and operative skills. 2 Because residents must meet minimum case volumes to show proficiency on program completion, 3 there is concern among both residents and program directors (PDs) regarding the severity of the impact of COVID-19 on neurosurgical resident education. 4cently, several centers have reported the significant changes that their departments have undergone as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.[5][6][7][8] Included in these changes are alterations to the methods for educating residents 9 and the clinical care duties of residents.For example, Weber et al. 2 at the Medical University of South Carolina and Burke et al. 7 at the University of California San Francisco described reorganizing their services to reduce the number of residents in the hospital at any one time. Fce-to-face patient handoffs have also been minimized and usual didactic programs have been shifted to videoconferencing platforms to reduce resident-to-resident contact. 2 Despite these single-institution experiences, there has yet to be a description of how residency programs on the whole are dealing with the pressures exerted by the COVID-19 pandemic.We sought to address this outstanding need by polling PDs, with the goal of using the information to help inform residency directors about how programs across the country are addressing resident education during the COVID-19 pandemic.