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 con-finement 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 stu- dents 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 “Igna-cio 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 com-munication 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 organi-zational.